


Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous

by northwrought



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Development, Coming of Age, Meta, Multi, Unreliable Narrator, author's constitutional inability to accept defeat, that last one should be a warning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 06:46:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 75
Words: 339,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15600630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northwrought/pseuds/northwrought
Summary: Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura were not in fact the only rookies in that year. This genin was going to be normal, emotionally well-balanced and happy if it killed her. Which, in Konoha, was almost a statistical certainty.Or,There are Naruto characters who can tell they're inside the Naruto story and honestly, take it pretty well.





	1. Meet Raiku

It was called the Genematrix, because at least one aspect of their lives had to be cool. The Genematrix was the source of every tragic story, dramatic interlude and attractively damaged character alive and previous. Simply put, its job was to make certain people's lives very interesting.

It was their job, very specifically, not to get caught in it.

"They" were technically a clan in both function and mannerisms, but the word "clan" was a Genematrix fetish and so they were instead a "family united under a common goal". The Gairano were unique for one very specific reason- each of them possessed the ability, or mutation, more likely, of a causality ... fail-field. Unlike other people, caught up in webs of intrigue and character development, Gairano could and compulsively did self-edit and generally stayed out of trouble, using this bizarre twist of fate to keep things running smoothly and staying out of it so that they could keep doing it.

And so, for a very long time this family united produced sickeningly and inappropriately emotionally well-balanced people and sent them off into the world, taking care to remain comfortably middle class even when presented with wealth, and fit enough to survive but not so much so as to lead the pack.

And then she was born.

To be fair, this wasn't her fault.

It wasn't even that she was wilfully malicious- if she had been, it would have been excusable. No, what went wrong was simply this:

Her mother died.

Her mother had some nine months previously stood for a few seconds too long in a Plot Device and had unwittingly spawned herself an electrokinetic daughter who detonated upon birth. Luckily the Genematrix had been stopped from descending on the two minute old murderer by a quick-thinking family member smacking a very surprised and extremely traumatised child in the head.

So maybe it was her fault.

Grief, unfortunately, wasn't exactly a staple of the family, and so her father simply squared his shoulders, dug through the sparking rubble and pulled out the daughter he promptly named. This one, the family united under a common goal thought with deep suspicion, was trouble.

Despite the Genematrix's best efforts, the less than imaginatively named Raiku was raised by a father who was neither abusive nor distant, who brought her up to be decent and to believe in self-sufficiency and the underappreciated value of boredom. Raiku, unsurprisingly, grew up to be pragmatic, emotionally well-balanced and enduring, if a little socially awkward.

This wasn't really the Genematrix's fault either; it was only a force of narrative causality, and it was trying its best.

Raiku was, in a word, average.

Certainly almost all of her skin had to be covered to avoid electrical mishap and negative or positive impacting experiences selectively, and for similar reasons she never went and ultimately didn't know how to swim, but she didn't have a hard or tragic life, and so she considered herself fairly lucky.

Average.

But lucky nonetheless.

To Raiku's credit, she tried. She really did. She was in the middle of her class, occasionally lower, and she had almost no friends. Her relentlessly cheerful personality had gotten her a great deal of suspicious looks as time went on, but she quickly learnt how to brood at appropriate times, and so she went through life largely undetected. Then, as these things do, something happened. A seemingly innocuous series of events apparently unrelated but of course purposeful, would change everything.

The family knew trouble when they saw it:

She was screwed.

 

 

Raiku smiled brilliantly.

Quite literally, as sparks danced along the edges of her straight white teeth. But aforementioned teeth were hidden behind a dark latex mask stretching up from her shirt, so it didn't really matter.

Today was the day she graduated, so unlike most other days, she could smile freely- her natural cheer hadn't made her many friends in the family, and as naturally suspicious creatures, the shinobi had been unsettled and edgy until the instalment of the mask.

She was twelve, and she was allowed to be happy today.

She was also right on time and walked down the sun-drenched street with her gloved hands in her pockets and a distinct air of punctuality that so many more interesting characters have never been able to achieve. She sent an eye-creasing smile to the store-keepers setting up and putting various items on display outside their shops, and they nodded in courteous response.

And that's when it happe-

She put her hands in her pockets, casually derailing narrative form.

The Gairano family was known to be distant, living on the edge of town on a slightly raised part of the mountain, allowing the comfortable compound to slightly overlook the city, alleviating the suffocating aura of the tall concrete buildings. Better yet it was also a really annoying climb, which was why they'd chosen it.

Raiku waved cheerfully to someone she didn't know particularly well as she crossed the street to the earthen schoolyard, weaving between families bidding kids tearful goodbye on their first day of school. Expression fixedly cheerful above the mask, she ducked under carelessly made arm gestures, what would have been a shock of white hair dyed carefully brown and tragically spiky.

No amount of hair curlers, scissors, hair gel or chakra would make the hair fall down in anything but loosely formed spikes, but they'd adjusted by cutting it so short even normal hair would have been spiky.

'Oi, Sakura!' a blonde girl with a devilishly smug expression called to a pink haired friend. Raiku murmured an excuse when she had to brush past, barely squeezing free of the throng to rest in front of the school building, a tall brick structure painted cheerfully with a traditional roof.

There was a distinct void in the noise next to her, and she looked up from the ground, hands resting on her knees as she caught her breath and cooled down.

Uchiha Sasuke – level five risk of drama. Impressive, since there were only three levels.

He looked down at her dispassionately.

She made a two fingered, casual salute and walked off as quickly as it was possible to nonchalantly walk off. A tall man in the garb of a chuunin smiled down at her warmly as she slipped her shoes off just inside the school doors, absently scratching a scar on his nose. 'You ready for the test today?' he asked, tucking his hands into his vest.

'Yes!' she responded cheerfully, smiling with equal warmth and bowing as much as she could. It was a learned skill, bowing from the bent position of removing shoes without tripping endearingly, but she'd learnt it well. She bowed again and padded past him, leaving Iruka fighting off the strange sensation of immediately and automatically forgetting a student he'd just spoken to.

'Raiku,' a boy with grey hair and a piece of grass in his mouth nodded, brooding aimlessly like all shinobi did when they weren't killing things. She waved, sitting down cross-legged outside the classroom door, just under the drawer she'd put her bag into. 'Ready for the test? We gotta pass to graduate,' he said to break the silence stretching on.

'Yep,' she confirmed readily. He made a curiously adult noncommittal sound and looked away, crossing his arms across his chest and leaning against the wall.

'R-,' a shy, stuttering voice began. Raiku's head whipped around, ready with a stock expression comprised of sparkling eyes and a cheerful tilt to the head.

Hyuuga Hinata- level one risk of drama.

The dark haired girl jerked back in surprise at the quick reaction, and Raiku counted in the pause before speaking. 'Hi!' she chirped. She decided chirping was a bit much. 'How are you?' she asked with a substitute of mild cheer.

'Okay,' Hinata said almost hesitantly. The stutter would drive her insane if she was in a team with her. Or it would drive Hinata insane- Raiku was incredibly patient, but with an average heartrate of three beats per second what was a long time for her was a startled silence for someone else, leaving her finishing other people's sentences when they took too long.

The white-eyed girl blushed. Perpetually, but it was noticeable right now. She could hardly be blamed, with that Plot sitting in her shadow. Only it wasn't the poor things fault this time, with the hyperactive blonde suddenly hanging off the smaller girl's shoulder.

'Hinata, you seen Iruka-sensei?' Naruto grinned with almost manic cheer. 'N-N-,'

'Iruka-sensei!' Naruto exclaimed, pelting down the hallway. Uzumaki Naruto – drama level ten, human whirlwind.

Raiku blinked rapidly in alarm as Hinata swayed ominously. 'He's gone!' she exclaimed quickly. Hinata caught herself, flushing scarlet with embarrassment.

'Come on,' Iruka sighed in good natured exasperation, casting the clan member a look and unlocking the classroom door.

Raiku let Hinata enter first, climbing up the plain wooden steps to a spot three rows from the back, near but not too near a window. Uchiha usually sat a few in front, so she should be free of the fangirls today, free to do the test and enjoy the last day of genin school.

Someone tragically high on the drama ranking cleared their throat in irritation.

Raiku smiled down at the front.

There was a silence.

'You,' Uchiha said, dark eyes looking at her irritably.

She turned her head, blinking up at him curiously. He was almost feminine in beauty, but the drama rank stamped onto his forehead stopped her from liking him. He waited expectantly, eyes drifting from her to the empty place next to the window pointedly.

He was going to use her as a fangirl shield.

She cringed.

He noticed.

He scowled at her and pushed past, settling with an almost spiteful efficiency. There was a pink haired girl shooting her the most threatening stare she'd ever received.

Raiku broke into a cold sweat.

A Plot oozed its way over the desks towards her: and then there was the one girl in the village who didn't love Uchiha Sasuke, who might just have been- she slammed her elbow onto the desk, and the Plot gave a feeble sound, like air released from a cushion, and vanished.

She felt the deadpan stare coming from her left, and smiled in the general direction of the front of the classroom nervously. The stare shifted off her, like a pressure alleviated. Maybe she shouldn't have assumed today would be so carefree after all. She sank down in her chair, troubled eyes just above the level of the desk. Someone turned into a naked woman.

She should have been sick today.

There was a loud crash as drama level ten made his presence known.

Dead, maybe.

 

 

'You've got a Plot on you,' her father said absently, stirring his noodles with his left hand and holding a brush with the other. Raiku blanched, already large eyes rounding to impressive size.

He smirked.

'You're a jerk, and you can't paint,' she informed him stiffly, turning her nose up in the air and putting her bag on the table. She slipped her shoes off, fixedly ignoring his snickers. Her father was roughly six feet tall with a wiry build, hardly unusual for a shinobi. His hair was thin but didn't look to be going anywhere, dark brown and trimmed short on the back and sides. Dark grey eyes glimmered with good humour over the table at her, taking in the headband place securely on her forehead. The steel felt strangely heavy and the fabric left a few square inches of skin left between mask and headband, which was ideal.

'Going for the direct, standardised approach?' he asked, recognising it was odd for a new genin to wear it so plainly.

Raiku narrowed her eyes at him. He grinned at her, looking down at his ink painting again. Their house was made from wood and very traditional, because it was old rather than because it was the feeling they tried to get across. There was a great deal of light in their home simply because they liked it that way, and while there was an occasional painting or picture the entire home was largely plain.

The shoji doors weren't so fortunate- they'd been expertly mended, but the fixes were clear to the eye when less than a metre away. Her father lamented the loss of the beautiful doors they had around their small shrine, but she refused to wear as many clothes in her own home as she had to outside, especially in summer. All in all, the skin exposed to the elements was the remaining square inches on her face.

Raiku yanked down the mask that reached the bridge of her nose, nudging his chair with her elbow on her way past him to the kitchen, placed around the corner. 'Good day at school then I take it?' he grinned at her back, keen eyes taking in the starts of white roots.

'I passed,' she confirmed, pulling down a satchet of instant miso, rubbing a hand through her hair at the pointed look.

'You've gotta dye it,' he reminded her, watching the kettle suspiciously.

'I know. And dad,' she added after a moment, expression deadpan. 'I'm twelve. I'm okay with a kettle, really I am.'

He sniffed, looking down his hawk-like nose at his noodles. 'Teammates?' he asked, changing the subject.

'Hatori Daisukenojo and Ryuu,' she said, stirring the water and the mixture together.

'Just Ryuu?' he asked, raising an eyebrow.

'I forget his last name,' she said dismissively.

'Daisukenojo,' her father muttered to himself, trying not to laugh.

'He's nice!' she said defensively, putting her hands on her hips.

'Sure,' he managed, shoulders shaking with repressed mirth.

'You're a jerk, you know that right?' she demanded.

'Sure,' he repeated again, biting the inside of his cheek.

'Dad,' she said warningly, narrowing her eyes at him. 'You only think this is funny becau- Plot!'

He slammed a foot onto the oozing black mass as it crossed to her, amusement vanishing with it.

There was a long silence.

'Well, looks like defending someone to me's out,' he said eventually, sending her a grin.

'You suck,' she said flatly, sipping her miso.

They fell into familiar, comfortable silence. Her father vanished from the room briefly, coming back with a towel, newspaper, gloves and a small packet of brown hair dye. 'I hope you know people think this is for me,' he said, waving it at her. 'They think I'm going grey. Grey! At my age! Thirty six!'

Wisely, Raiku kept her mouth shut regarding certain temporal discrepancies, choosing to finish her miso instead.

'Come on Sparky,' he gestured, pulling the gloves on. 'And try not to zap me this time.'

She quirked a brow as minute sparks dissipated in the air she exhaled.

'Show off,' he rolled his eyes.

Life as normal.


	2. Run Raiku, Run

The city of Konoha was beginning to awake, the vigilant sentinels of Continuity ensuring that the unfortunate stayed that way and secrets were kept until the least appropriate possible time for them to be revealed. As usual, the Genematrix hammered on the doors of the Gairano Compound, the complex squatting like a belligerent badger on the foot of the mountain with the words 'CUT TO THE CHASE' emblazoned upon the walls in a suitably obscure foreign language. Someone came out with a broom, pushing at it in a distinctly unfriendly fashion until it went to bother Uzumaki Naruto, who'd never really done anything to deserve it.

In the meantime, Raiku was about to meet her team, Team Yamada, for the first time.

'Have fun,' her father grinned devilishly from the door, watching his daughter pause at the doors of their compound.

She instantly turned and narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. Well wishes were not common in this family, since people who took up a habit usually died tragically and left a habit-shaped void in a character's life.

'You're going to meet the man of your dreams,' he said solemnly, in answer to her unspoken question.

'You're lying!' she exclaimed, levelling an infuriated glare at him. 'You never tell the truth!'

'Come on, sweetie, you know I'm not allowed to scare you out of going to your first day!' he protested.

She gave a triumphant cry, pointing at him accusingly.

He paused, caught out, before he hurriedly vanished inside. Raiku's shoulders slumped and she groaned loudly. 'Why can't you be more helpful!?' she called after him.

No response, though he was undoubtedly waiting, pressed against the wall next to the door.

'Gairano, you coming or what!?' a very short, very bright haired genin yelled up the hill, shading his eyes with his hand and squinting against the glare. Daisukenojo was a short boy in a tall family, and no one was going to let him forget it. They probably wouldn't forget the teeth he'd knock out and make them swallow when they said anything to his face, either.

Raiku spun, sending him a thumbs-up while her face creased into its standard, if faintly nervous, smile. All she had to do was stay away from brooding storylines and monologues.

For the rest of her life.

She skidded down the almost sheer cliff face, sending a shower of pebbles and dirt onto the violently red-haired boy, who sputtered in a combination of indignation and rage. 'Sorry!' she called, feet slamming into the ground in practised confidence.

'Why the hell don't you bastards buy some stairs!?' Daisukenojo demanded, shooting her a vile glare from murky hazel eyes. She rubbed the back of her head, smiling apologetically. Daisukenojo was perfect for a teammate- both parents were still alive, he was cute but not handsome, and his inferiority complex made him even angrier than his family was reputed to be.

'We like rock-climbing?' she offered sheepishly. When he failed to laugh, she cleared her throat awkwardly. 'We're meeting Yamada on training ground two, right?'

Daisukenojo, features more freckle than face, didn't say anything.

'Right!' she supplied, eyes almost physically producing joy with the effort she was putting in. 'So let's go!'

Raiku set off at a brisk walk, and after a moment Daisukenojo followed. Vaguely, she wanted him to at least fake civility. It wasn't her fault his name translated to 'big', 'helpful' or 'flower'. Even the Genematrix wouldn't take responsibility for that sort of poor taste. At least he was too belligerent to be deeply traumatised instead of just perpetually aggravated.

'Raiku,' the same grass-chewing grey haired boy greeted, still leaning against a wall though this one was admittedly made of brick and covered in posters. Ryuu's family had given him a perfectly good name when he'd been adopted, so there was absolutely no reason for him to ignore it- her drama sense twinged alarmingly. She gave him an odd look, one eye suddenly larger than the other as she squinted. What would he do if there was no wall to lean on? Fall over? Here was yet another example of poor character construction.

'You're on my team,' he said, taking the grass out to spin between his figures. His hair was the co-

His hair was grey, she noted stubbornly, fixedly ignoring the metaphor that had suddenly come to mind. This one would be tricky. His eyes were so pale brown as to be yellow, and while he was certainly better looking than the Big Helpful Flower, he'd been adopted into a loving family and so presented minimal risk.

She noticed the beginnings of brood lines on his face.

He'd have to be moved up on the drama rankings; he may have family still living, some sort of bloodline or a secretly evil-but-not-actually-evil twin.

'Yes,' she agreed simply and cheerfully.

'And you too, midget,' he said, dismissing the much shorter redhead and falling into place next to Raiku. There was an enraged squawk.

'Please,' she said, brow creasing nervously. 'Don't fight before we even meet our team leader. Please?'

Ryuu made a noncommittal sound.

'I'm going to have to label you a "two" now,' she mumbled under her breath, sticking her hands in her pockets as the concrete under their feet gradually turned to grass, then dirt. This was already less than ideal. Two boys and a girl- not a bad combination, unless the girl was sweet. Raiku wasn't sweet, she was more savoury, and so there was minimal risk  _there_. However, a boy with something to prove and a Class Five Brooder was a bad idea.

Ryuu came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the grassy field, turning in full circle to scan the sun dappled trees, wind blowing his hair back in a choreographically attractive way.

 _First aversion technique_ , she thought to herself, eyeballing the strands shrewdly from underneath her forehead protector.  _Cut his hair._

"Being late on your first day isn't a good start!" someone called to them, and there was a rustling of clothes shortly before the ground shook. Raiku started, eyes widening to epic proportions at the feel of the vibrations. Was there a giant coming towards them? Might Gai? Was Might Gai back in town!?

She spun around to face the direction Ryuu had already turned to.

At last, Team Yamada faced Yamada. And he was the size of a mountain.

Under the standard clothes of a Konoha jounin muscles moved fluidly, the biceps resting somewhere at least a foot about Raiku's head, or so it seemed from this angle. She stared up at him, jaw dropping under the mask as the gargantuan man sent her a grin. His jaw was almost perfectly square, his thin lips marked with scars that told them those lips had been sewn shut at least once. His eye colour was almost impossible to tell from this distance, set under a prominent brow and hair so short it may as well have been shaven.

Raiku made an unintelligible, helpless sound in the back of her throat, eyes watering as the sun cast their new teacher in stark illumination. He grinned down at the three genin, hands the size of dinnerplates coming to rest staunchly on his hips.

 _I think one of those is bigger than my face_ , a voice in Raiku's head whimpered. Raiku was a hundred and sixty centimetres tall, and that was gigantic for a twelve year old girl. This man was… at least a metre taller than her.

Raiku was built like a rail.

He was built like a small country.

"Are you three going to stare at me all day?" Yamada asked, as lightly as a man with the voice of a bear reasonably could, his voice still warranting quotation marks rather than the standard apostrophes.

She swallowed, hard. 'You… have… no eyebrows,' she whimpered eventually, obviously at a loss for something to say. Oh for the fluid vocabulary of a Main Character (Raiku being one of those people who could and would actually think in capital letters). Raiku was really best placed in the Gairano family: she was a certified wimp, which was understandable when you have arms like noodles, and thus she was completely unsuitable for the arduous physical and emotional strain of a Plot.

The aforementioned area where the eyebrows should have been wrinkled slightly as he shot her a sceptical look. This was clearly not what he'd been expecting. A thin girl, skin completely covered but for that around disproportionately large, electric blue eyes and almost rudely spiky hair. A taller, lanky boy at least slightly more muscular stood next to her with grey hair and strange eyes, glowering up at him unabashedly. That short guy. He was already starting to rue the day he got that damn short guy. They were always the meanest.

Yamada's grin stretched even further across his face.

He knew it was a mistake as soon as he did it. The girl blanched, eyes appearing to swallow up her face.

 _His grin is as big as my entire face,_ she thought weakly.

"Alright!" he said briskly, looking away in what would, in a man about a metre shorter, have been called awkwardness. "We're Team Ten! And you know what that means."

'It means there are nine teams better than us?' Ryuu guessed dully, sticking his hands into the pockets of his black, three quarter pants. In the face of this kid who appeared about five hundred in terms of personality carbon dating, Yamada was beginning to realise that he may have been better off in ANBU.

"That'll be twenty push-ups, kid," he instructed, sticking his own, far more impressive hands in his pockets.

Wind whistled through the grass in the otherwise perfect silence. Somewhere, a Gairano stole the shoes of a girl from Kansas.

Yamada loomed over the much shorter genin, eyes burning like hostile stars in the middle of an unfriendly sky, fist held up and shaking with righteous fury.

Ryuu dropped to toes and fingertips.

"One – It  _means_  – two ," Yamada said, suddenly cheery, counting out the push-ups with malicious glee. "We're Team – four – Ten. Nothing else, got me? Five. Slowing down there?" he asked Ryuu, eyes glinting evilly, resting his boulder sized foot between his shoulder blades.

'No,' Ryuu forced out.

"Good! Six." He looked towards the other two, one of which was shaking slightly. It had to be the heat, he decided, almost worried for the stick. The Gairano family were always a bit… eccentric, but the clothing had to be pushing it. "You've gotta be the best  _you_  can be, and stop worrying about the other teams. Worry about them later, got me?"

'You say "got me" a lot,' the midget criticised.

Yamada glowered. "Accurate observations- that's fifteen push-ups!"

Raiku edged back, afraid she was going to be next as Daisukenojo dropped. This jounin was more of a drill instructor than a shinobi. Which yeah, was just what they needed, but she was actually beginning to prefer the tragic past and occasional monologue. She was getting the impression he was a nice man, who liked yelling.

But nice men had no right to be over six feet tall.

"In case you ladies haven't noticed," Yamada said cheerfully, apparently possessing the ability to trade between moods faster than Raiku could blink. "We're going to be training  _endurance_  today. That means you, skinny, so drop!" he roared, abruptly changing approach again.

There was no  _immediate_ response, but the second he pointed at her threateningly Raiku shrieked in terror and ran, furious footsteps and convenient alliteration leaving a trail of dust flying up after her.

Daisukenojo collapsed onto his side in hysterics as Yamada stared after her, then came back to his senses and pointed at her rapidly retreating back. "You get back here! Ten more push-ups for you!" he added to Daisukenojo, starting after her.

Raiku pelted through the training fields, hurtling over targets and at one point, an entire class of children and Iruka-sensei. Behind her, Yamada-sensei yelled in a way she found distinctly foreboding. She shrieked again, this time in alarm as Naruto and the unfortunate Uchiha came into view. Naruto blanched, taking a step back, shortly before Yamada-sensei came into view as a one-man locomotive: unstoppable and probably about as pissed off as a half-assed metaphor was capable of being.

Naruto screamed. The Uchiha's eyes widened. Raiku ducked under Naruto legs as they flailed, desperately trying to get their largely unresponsive owner to move away. Her own feet dug sharply into the ground, leaving a skid on the road behind her as she came to a gradual halt only just past the blonde, a highly important part of the Gairano code blaring loudly in her mind.

'I'm sorry!' she apologised desperately, dancing slightly on the spot as she tried simultaneously to both get away and apologise. 'I'm sorry!'

'What- what the- Raiku!?' Naruto managed, staring at her. 'What're you doing!?'

'I'm sorry!' she repeated, eyes wide and desperate for some sort of forgiveness, shortly before she was hoisted into the air by the back of her shirt, giving a sharp yelp.

Yamada-sensei eyeballed her threateningly. Sasuke watched in interest as what appeared to be  _all_  the colour in her face vanished.

She whimpered helplessly. 'Oi! What do you think you're doing!?' Naruto demanded. His heart was in the right place, but his execution needed work. Yamada cast him a glance, then looked back to the errant, visibly shaking student.

"Was it the pointing?" he asked, tilting his massive head and giving her a shrewd look.

Raiku nodded. She may have nodded. It was feasible that amidst the shaking, there was a nod in there.

"You can't run off every time someone points at you," he reminded her, and realised that his voice actually did sound like he was growling at her.

Another possible nod.

'Your students running away from you, Yamada?' a deep, lazy voice enquired.

Kakashi Hatake – level three risk of drama.

"It's gotta be the pointing," Yamada grumbled, giving the aforementioned student a light shake, as though to emphasise it. "Gotta admit she's quick, though," he pointed out, lowering her slightly. The shorter (though probably quite tall) jounin nodded, one eye impractically covered by his forehead protector, the other droopy one looking directly at them and far more amused than he probably should have been.

"See, I'm not gonna kill you," Yamada said exasperatedly, rolling his eyes. "You see? Everyone gets all worked up over nothing. Feeling pretty stupid now, aren't you?"

'Please put me down,' Raiku whimpered, curled into the foetal position and eyes staring longingly at the ground. Yamada started, setting her firmly on the ground immediately. She collapsed and hugged the concrete lovingly.

"Come on, speedy, we've got some push-ups to catch up on!" Yamada said smugly, nudging her with his foot.

'Okay,' she managed, though she really wanted to scream in terror and beg for mercy because she wasn't sure she wanted to be a shinobi if it meant working with him anymore. She dragged herself into a wobbly standing position that almost failed her as he clapped a hand on her shoulder and successfully jarred her entire skeleton into new, uncomfortable structure. "You're looking like a  _taijutsu_  student," he said smugly. His face darkened and she winced, already knowing what was coming.

"Eighty push-ups!" he roared after her rapidly retreating back, Raiku already sprinting back to the training grounds. "And so HELP YOU if you cheat, speedy!" He waited the several seconds it took for her to vanish, before adding, "Nice to see you again, Kakashi," in friendly afterthought, sticking his hands in his pockets and sauntering off, whistling. "She's  _really_  quick."

 

 

 

 

 

The sun set in a picturesque fashion, allowing the sunlight to filter through the buildings and shadows to lazily multiply, artificial lights winking into existence as a gentle breeze blew the heat of the day away. From the Gairano compound, this was a truly beautiful, serene end to an uneventful day.

Someone wheezed pathetically, a bruised and scraped hand clawing upwards to grab the top of the small plateau in front of the gates, before the rest of the unfortunate individual hauled themselves up to lie helplessly sprawled on the dirt and grass.

'Yeah,' she panted, in what could loosely be called triumph. She tried to lift a hand to make some sort of victory gesture, but her arm merely jerked sadly. 'Made it,' she managed, head falling back and eyes closing.

The smell of red bean dumplings wafted across on the sweet Konoha breeze.

Her eyes shot open. 'It's… it's not  _fair_ ,' she whispered to herself faintly, vaguely incredulously, wide eyes staring up at the sky.

'Wow, these  _ARE_  some delicious dumplings,' her father said in an obnoxiously loud tone, apparently seeing fit to eat outside today, about ten metres away from where she was lying. ' _Really_. Raiku  _would_  enjoy these, thank you Mai, but she  _appears_  to have gotten  _lost_  on the way home from her first day of training! After all, she hasn't gone through those gates  _all day_.'

Slowly, Raiku turned her head to shoot her unbearably gleeful father the most poisonous glare she could muster. Even more slowly, she slammed her hand onto the ground and started half-walking, half-crawling through, falling to the ground when she safely passed the perimeter.

'I didn't know you could hurt your forehead muscles,' she groaned. 'Or muscles in your ears. Until today.'

Her father gloated from his chair, while a woman with lovely and dull brown hair stared at her, paused in the middle of serving a distant cousin. Gairanos were in the habit of marrying civilians, for obvious reasons. 'You're home, sweetie! How was your day?' he asked gleefully.

Raiku forced a hand up, tugging her mask down roughly and scraping her nose in the process. Teeth bared, sparks jumped out to die on the ground.

'Now now,' he said in mock solemnity. 'Is that any way to behave after your very first day?'

Sometimes, Raiku thought as she realised she was truly and utterly incapable of getting to the table to actually eat, the kids with the Plots had it so much easier.


	3. near death experiences and accidental molestation

Truly, if anything could be said for Yamada, it was that he was thorough. But this… this seemed a little excessive.

The dog's head alone was bigger than she was. While the dog itself wasn't as  _tall_ , it had to weigh at least twice as much as she did.

"This, ladies, is your very first D-ranked mission!" Yamada informed them jovially, holding the leash the monstrous canine was attached to, leather wrapped thrice around his fist.

It drooled menace.

Raiku stared back at it with a mixture of fascination and complete and utter terror. Terror sucker-punched fascination in the kidney when the dog pulled slightly on the lead in her direction.

'I'll take first go,' Daisukenojo volunteered to everyone's surprise. At their awestruck stares, he coloured defensively. 'I like dogs!'

'That isn't a dog, it's a  _bear_ , _'_ Ryuu pointed out, cringing slightly.

'I'll take… last,' Raiku said, hoping to any god listening that the dog would be tired by then.

'You gonna run away?' Daisukenojo asked, smirking at her insufferably. 'It might eat you, skinny.'

'It'd have an easier time with you, midget,' Ryuu remarked boredly, sticking his hands in his pockets.

Daisukenojo flushed for the second time in as many minutes, this time in anger. 'How about you say-,'

Their volatile leader abruptly unclenched his fist.

"Enjoy!"

The dog lunged for them, suddenly ecstatic with freedom and probably spurred on by Yamada's laughing.

_I will not run away, I will not run away-_

Oh, who was she kidding? Raiku was the best runner in her rookie class, and it was from practice. She managed to take a single step before Daisukenojo grabbed her and held her in front of him defensively, earning a short scream.

'Oh, tough guy!' Ryuu taunted shortly before a bone-crushing display of canine affection bowled him over.

Raiku laughed nervously, eyes darting between the dog and Ryuu's enraged face. 'Let me go?' she offered, laugh turning vaguely hysterical as the dog looked up to trace the voice to its owner.

It stared at her.

She stared back.

'Let me go!' she repeated in higher pitch when it took a step towards her, cavernous eyes shining at her brightly.

Daisukenojo took a wary step back.

The dog saw the opportunity and lunged, trampling Raiku into the ground in its haste to follow him, pressing her hand into the concrete almost hard enough to break it and definitely at least bruising her ribs. Raiku curled into a ball defensively, clamping her hands protectively over her ears.

'Follow HIM! Follow HIM!' Daisukenojo yelled, desperately waving his arms in Ryuu's direction.

'Good  _boy_!' Ryuu grinned maliciously as the dog took an uncertain step towards Daisukenojo yet again, caught between the two of them. It looked between them in confusion, a relatively new concept for a dog.

"Just don't make any sudden moves, speedy," Yamada advised Raiku, who was currently trying to make herself conspicuous on the street under the dog's legs. "It'll get bored. Like a  _bear_. Bears get bored if you play dead, get me?"

She bit her lip tremulously. 'Why did you have to compare it to a bear?' she squeaked. Drool landed on her forehead and the behemoth happily panted, apparently not intending on going anywhere.

Raiku stared up in traumatised horror as more threatened to descend.

Daisukenojo feinted to the left and cursed when the dog followed his every move. Ryuu inched for the forgotten and trailing end of the lead. 'Easy now,' he breathed, sticking close to the ground and stretching shaking fingers for the leather. 'Easy…'

It gave a joyous bark, dropping and preparing to pounce on him. Raiku gave a pathetic wheeze as the air was successfully driven from her lungs. Ryuu yelled in a distinctly unmanly fashion and tripped backwards. Daisukenojo wasn't as subtle and took a diving roll for the leash, grabbing it just as the dog decided on a target.

Yamada watched the dog bounding- maybe galloping was a better word- down the street with Daisukenojo attached and screaming, and decided maybe this wasn't such a bad gig after all.

Then it came back.

'Make it stop!' Daisukenojo screamed as he flew past in a red blur.

'Don't you  _dare_ ,Gairano!' Ryuu shouted at her from across the street where he was pressed against the wall like it would save him. She threw her leg out and tripped it over, sending the ball of red hair, grey fur and at least four limbs rolling into the wall surrounding the corner.

"That is  _not_  how you fight a bear, speedy," Yamada criticised from the safe height of the top of the fence. Said 'bear' lay with its legs in the air, tongue lolling out of its mouth pathetically and a low whine issuing from it.

A hand thrown out from under its bulk twitched, then clawed at the ground as the almost completely encompassed Daisukenojo probably started to suffocate. Muffled wheezing became audible.

Yamada smiled cheerfully. "Not bad for your first mission; all things considered."

The hand stopped wriggling.

'I think Daisukenojo's dead,' Raiku said, eyeing the hand worriedly.

"Yeah," Yamada said smugly. "Not bad for your first mission. Now tell me, where have you three gone wrong today?"

'Shouldn't we help him…?' Raiku offered, cringing in sympathetic pain at Daisukenojo's visible hand.

"Answer my question, speedy!"

'I don't know!' she yelped, covering her head to protect herself from his wrath.

"You didn't  _work together_. Now I'm betting that if you two both gave it a shot at once, you could lift Cerberus off Daisukenojo before he dies," Yamada said firmly.

_Its name was Cerberus…?_

Raiku and Ryuu exchanged looks, and wordlessly got to their feet and stood at either end of the deeply embarrassed dog. There was the shared, silent promise that this would never,  _ever_  be mentioned again, and they both grabbed canine and pulled.

Cerberus rolled over with an absolutely scandalised expression, and Raiku and Ryuu fixedly avoided each other's gaze in favour of staring at Daisukenojo.

He coughed feebly.

Ryuu nudged him with a none-too-gentle foot, giving him a careless glance. 'Get up, midget.'

'Screw… off,' he managed, almost completely flattened into the street.

'Daisukenojo, can you breathe now?' Raiku worried, crouching next to his head and peering down at him. A dead teammate would be level five Trauma! Anything about level two led to a Drama Ranked Love Interest!

Love Interest.

She shuddered slightly, largely unnoticed as Daisukenojo managed to nod at her. 'Are you sure?' she pressed, forehead wrinkling in concern- just visible under the forehead protector. 'You seem sort of… winded.'

'I'm fine,' he maintained in a shallow wheeze, giving her a thumbs up.

A heavy hand clapped her shoulder and Ryuu's respectively, Yamada standing cheerfully next to the sprawled figure of their teammate. "You see? Working together, you ensured that short stuff lived to see another day! Good work!"

'I hate you… so much…'

"Good!" the giant enthused, shooting him a manic grin. "Now we go back to training, because you three can't even handle a dog!" The thought of training seemed to make him immensely cheerful, plastering a large and dazzling smile over his face as he sauntered in the direction of training ground two.

'He's gotta be putting on an act,' Ryuu said eventually, watching him go. 'Like the Uchiha's teacher.'

Raiku looked up from Daisukenojo, hand still outstretched to help him up. 'Yeah?'

'Yeah. "See what's underneath the underneath," apparently,' Ryuu remarked, sticking his hands in his pockets and following their leader. Raiku tilted her head quizzically before Daisukenojo accepted her help and almost sent her crashing to the ground with his weight, brushing himself off. 'Freak,' he snorted. 'At least he's not some sort of control freak,' he did have the grace to concede.

Raiku nodded, putting an expression of sheepish happiness onto the visible parts of her face, rubbing the back of her head with a hand. Daisukenojo flushed, awkwardly punching her in the shoulder. 'Thanks anyway, skitzoid.'

Raiku blinked. 'What did you call me?' she asked in surprise. Daisukenojo roughly brushed a hand over his face and stalked off, back stiff.

She gawked after him. 'I am  _not_  a skitzoid!' she protested, taking off after him.

'I thought you were supposed to be quick!?' he shot back, not that that stopped him from accelerating into a jog. 'I'll show you how quick I am!' she threatened, righteous fury burning in her eyes.

To her credit, it's relevant to point out at this time that Raiku lived a life free from all major sins. She liked puppies, helped old ladies, and was respectful to her father sometimes.

She really didn't deserve what was about to happen to her.

Neither, of course, did Hinata, but that didn't stop the short-haired girl from stepping directly into her path when even Raiku's reflexes couldn't slow her down in time. She had just enough time to turn towards the fake brunette and throw her arms in front of her face before the sidewalk came rushing up to meet the back of her head.

After a few seconds, Raiku groaned, stirring from her position above Hinata. She opened a bleary, electric blue eye as Hinata's terrified face came into view.

…  _Detailed_  view.

Raiku blinked in obvious puzzlement. 'Hinata?' she asked curiously. 'When did you get here?'

Hinata swallowed nervously, blank white eyes huge.

Raiku blinked. 'Hinata?'

There was that odd quality in the air that only occurs when someone's watching something the parties involved don't particularly want them to see.

Slowly, Raiku turned her head to her right.

A very beautiful, voluptuous woman was looking down at them, hands resting on white clad hips, dressed in a dress-

Raiku squinted.

...Made out of fabric strips?

The woman's red eyes glinted.

Raiku's head jerked back to star down at Hinata, then down at herself.

Hinata was really worst off here. She couldn't even move, the skin exposed where her jumper had ridden up now almost exposed to the skin of Raiku's wrist, even the several inches of proximity sending a mild electric current through her. The main problem was actually that one of Raiku's legs was thrown on either side of her, and neither of them had moved.

A shaggy haired boy with a puppy on his head grinned with appropriate wolfishness.

Raiku yelped and lunged to her feet and back several steps, bowing so low she almost bent in half. 'I'm sorry!'

'I'm not,' the boy- Kiba? Yeah, probably Kiba- smirked.

'R-Raiku…?' Hinata managed, struggling to sit propped on her elbows.

'That's me! … An apologetic me, just so you know!' Raiku confirmed, keeping her eyes screwed shut, hands trying desperately to pull the ripped fabric of her sleeve back over to protect her wrist.

'Gairano, Raiku?' the woman she now recognised as their jounin leader asked in a low, unintentionally silky voice.

'Yes!' she winced faintly.  _That_  wouldn't earn her any points, now that she'd apparently molested the Hyuuga heir on a public street.

Oh god.

What if this was the beginning of a lesbian sub-plot?

She paled, keeping her head low to hide it. She didn't want to be a lesbian! She preferred boys! Liked them as much as a twelve year old reasonably could, really!

Her sudden terror was fortunately misconstrued. 'I-I'm okay, R-Raiku,' Hinata said, making her wobbly way onto her feet. Raiku waited for the question:  _So, how long have you been the natural soul mate of a light bulb_?

It never came.

'Y-You were… in a hurry?' Hinata asked tremulously, keeping her eyes averted.

Raiku shot up, hands coming up to grip her hair in panic. 'Oh no, Yamada!' she exclaimed, before looking to Hinata with a terrified expression. 'I'm sorry, I have to go! I'm sorry about before! Sorry!' she added again for good measure and sprinted away as fast as she could.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hinata stared after her, still ironically shocked. Kurenai put a comforting hand on her shoulder, misinterpreting the expression. Hinata looked down at the hand over her heart.

_Why… Is my heart beating so fast?_

It was  _actually_  because there was a great deal of highly unwanted electricity bouncing around her nervous system and making her body literally go haywire, but she hadn't ever been electrocuted before and so she couldn't really tell.

She flushed dark red and dropped her hand quickly.

She was going to try  _really_  hard to avoid Gairano Raiku from now on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yamada was standing in the middle of the grassy training ground when she managed to catch up to them, the two boys of her team waiting for her expectantly. "Taking time out to smell the roses, speedy!?" Yamada barked, dark eyes glittering gleefully. "Fifty push-ups! And your nose better touch the ground each time, get me!?"

Raiku's shoulders slumped wearily and a groan escaped her as she hung her head.

Between the molestations and push-ups, being a shinobi was much harder than she'd anticipated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not intended to be a wlw tease, more traumatising the poor main.


	4. subconsciously uncooperative

It was one week and at least five hundred push-ups later that Yamada discovered Raiku simply could not access more than miniscule amounts of chakra.

"Speedy," he sighed wearily, head in his hands while he sat on a conveniently low tree branch. "Everybody has chakra. You just aren't very good with it, get me?"

Raiku sat cross-legged on the grass and stared up at him imploringly. 'Maybe I'm cursed?' she offered largely unhelpfully.

"You are not cursed!" Yamada retorted, though privately he was starting to agree. "You had to use the Clone technique to graduate after all- you've gotta have at least a little in there."

'I think it's shy.'

"Chakra is not-!" he broke off mid-sentence, hanging his head in frustration. Raiku looked up at him with endless willingness to help written in those massive blue eyes, and it only made the whole situation that much more awkward for him. It wasn't that she was being difficult and he knew that: she was simply too terrified of… everything, to be that difficult.

Raiku on the other hand, was pondering something else entirely.

I haven't seen Hinata lately, she worried to herself, tilting her head to look at the sky between branches.  _Has she told her family I electrocuted her and are they coming to murder me now? Does her family think I molested her and_ _ **are**_ _they coming to murder me now!?_

"Speedy!" Yamada said as he snapped his fingers under her nose. "Come back speedy, we're not done here!" Raiku's head snapped back to let her look at him fearfully. That fearful expression was going to have to go. The girl was too highly strung, Yamada thought wearily.

"Look speedy, you can't rush chakra," he lied, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. "It's just one of those things. I'm gonna give you some techniques to practise at home, got me? Every day."

She nodded enthusiastically. There was a short silence of mutual understanding and exasperation, before Yamada came to his senses and composed himself. "Right," he said gruffly, clearing his throat. "Until you start getting better on that front, we're going to work on taijutsu."

Raiku knew she looked like a rabbit sitting directly in the path of a fox, but it was getting to be so automatic she was afraid her face would be stuck this way forever.

"Go and find Sullen and Shorty, we'll start with some partner work," Yamada instructed.

'You like the letter "s",' Raiku offered. Yamada inhaled to respond with orders of self-inflicted physical punishment, but when she flinched he relented. "Just go," he said wearily. She visibly (and appropriately) brightened, darting off.

"Getting soft in my old age," he muttered, crossing his arms across his chest.

Raiku jogged down across the grass to the beginning of the streets, setting her feet on concrete before she stopped to make a plan of action. Daisukenojo was probably at home with all six of his siblings, but he might refuse to help her look for Ryuu. She sighed, rubbing her neck. They made this so much harder than it should have been. Ryuu was more likely to complain rather than just refuse, so she decided to find him first.

When she arrived at his pleasantly plain home his pleasantly plain mother told her he'd gone out, presumably to meet his team. Raiku thanked her and went back to the gate, side-stepping an over-enthused rookie barrelling his way down the street. What did she know about Ryuu?

Almost nothing.

Well, that was better than actually knowing nothing, she guessed. And his house was sort of near the Hyuuga compound…

Should she apologise now? Or was it too late to apologise and they'd just thank her for making the assassination easier? Maybe she was blowing this out of proportion and-

Raiku paused mid-step, tilting her head. She frowned slightly under the mask, turning to look over her shoulder. Other than some friends milling absently next to a fence, there was no one.

She shrugged and continued on. She could've sworn she heard something…

 

 

 

 

'Remind me why we're hiding from spikes?' Kiba asked Hinata, grinning devilishly. Hinata went bright red. 'N-no reason!'

 

 

 

 

Ryuu, Ryuu… Raiku pondered, deep in thought as her feet subconsciously took her to the eating and shopping district. If I were-

'What do you want?' Ryuu asked bluntly. She shrieked, recoiling from the man suddenly existent on her left. 'When did you get there!?' she demanded.

Ryuu raised an eyebrow. 'You've been standing there saying my name for about twenty minutes now. In the end someone told me so that you'd stop scaring away business.'

She spun around, fixing a glowering storekeeper with a scandalised look. He made an impatient shooing motion.

'What do you want?' Ryuu repeated, rolling his eyes. She blinked, turning back to him. 'Yamada wants to practice taijutsu.'

'Gave up on your chakra?' he asked, lips twitching slightly.

'Y- No,' she coughed. Ryuu nodded knowingly. 'Sure.'

'We have to go find Daisukenojo anyway,' she muttered sullenly, crossing her arms across her chest. Ryuu grimaced. 'Let's get going. The sooner we get there, the sooner we can avoid his spastic family.'

'His family's not spastic!' Raiku retorted, giving him an eye roll of her own. 'You need to at least try to get along. You know, find some common ground?'

Ryuu changed the subject, making his way through the crowds with deceptive ease. 'I hear you jumped Hinata. I admire your bravery,' he smirked.

She gawked at him, weaving through the throng of people with considerably less grace and considerably more contortion. 'I didn't! It was an accident! IT WAS AN ACCIDENT.'

'Of course,' he said innocently as he pulled free of the majority and found himself almost at Daisukenojo's street with alarmingly convenient narrative styling.

'Which house is his?' he asked over his shoulder. From the crease of her eyes, Raiku was smiling. 'Follow the screams.'

As if on cue (which it most definitely was), an ear-splitting shriek assaulted them. From the third house on the left, which looked as though it had once been beautiful but now was simply sprawling. The walls had been obviously and hastily mended almost everywhere, standing in direct contrast to the curiously reverently tended garden.

A lanky red-haired child bit a lankier red-haired child on the ear. The lankier one was evidently the source of the screams. 'DAISUKE!' he- she- it shrieked.

'Shut up!' came the immediate bellow from the house. 'Excuse me,' Raiku began, immediately dismissed. 'Excuse me?' she tried again in vaguely incredulous tones.

There was what would have been a silence if it wasn't filled with the sounds of two people trying to ignore her.

'OI!' Ryuu barked, giving them a fierce glare. 'Get Daisukenojo!'

The shorter one screamed while the other ran inside. Ryuu sent her a smug look from the corner of a yellow eye. There was a suspicious series of crashes and yelps shortly before their short teammate came bursting out the door mid-yell. 'What the hell do you want R-,'

'Hey!' Raiku greeted cheerfully, eyes creasing to indicate a large smile. 'Yamada wants us up on the training field to practise taijutsu!'

He went red, caught in the middle of the beginning sentence of a tirade and now left with nowhere to go. She was just so damn… pathetic. It was like kicking a puppy. Granted it was a puppy that had made itself the most inconvenient hindrance alive by eating only every left shoe you owned, but it was a puppy nonetheless.

'Let's go,' he grumbled, slouching with what was dangerously close to petulance. She smiled at him again and he wished she'd stop. 'He gave up on your chakra then?' he asked. Raiku's smile vanished.

It wasn't her fault and she did know that. But whenever she tried to access any more than a tiny amount of chakra this damn pressure built up in her chest and in her arms, only ever getting worse. She narrowed her eyes and stuck her hands in her pockets, glowering at the ground. She would access her chakra.

She would.

"You took your damn time, speedy!"

A lovely greeting, courtesy of Yamada.

'I walked!' she protested. 'You never said I had to run!'

"It was implied, get me? Now," he said, rubbing his hands together in a business-like fashion. "You all know what taijutsu is, and you've all done some of the basics at school. You've got a fairly good idea, don't you?"

Raiku brightened. Daisukenojo and Ryuu just looked suspicious.

"Wrong!" Yamada roared, almost physically blowing Raiku away in the process. "You do NOT have a good idea of what taijutsu is! Today you are going to work, and then you're going to work, and then you're going to work some more, until I tell you that you're doing it right, get me!?"

Awestruck silence.

He inhaled sharply. "GET ME!?"

'Yes Yamada!' the three responded in barely (and in one instance, not even slightly) concealed terror. "Good!" he said brightly. "Now, I'm going to give you some exercises for all three of you to work on your chakra with, and then I'm going to show you some moves. You're going to take it in turns to fight each other, all nice and friendly."

The punches were basic but apparently all three of them were doing them wrong. Their kicks left a lot to be desired but were apparently less feeble than their punches. Only Daisukenojo could do a perfect hold, but the other two got by. Satisfied that their 'feeble, womanly ways' would allow for a half decent fight, Yamada paired Ryuu and Daisukenojo and sat Raiku down with a chakra exercise, then promptly vanished to consult someone about something.

Probably her, Raiku supposed glumly, sitting cross-legged yet again and holding her hands in front of her. Her left hand was parallel to the ground, held loosely at the level of her chest with the palm facing upwards. The right hovered a small way above it, palm down. Both hands were, to her supreme discomfort, bare. Any closer and strings of electricity would connect the two, surging more powerfully the more she pressed.

She closed her eyes, and tried to bring the chakra to the surface. Daisukenojo and Ryuu had both managed a healthy glow and proceeded to compete for who could glow the brightest. She couldn't even manage a glimmer.

Establishing the connection wasn't the problem. She could feel her chakra flow, could even direct it where she wanted it to go. The problem was the pressure. The second she tried to manipulate it externally, or even to a certain degree internally, it felt like something was taking everything under the skin and forcing it together. The harder she tried, the heavier it got until it felt like there was something coiling under the skin of her chest preparing to strike.

She screwed her eyes even further shut to concentrate when Daisukenojo gave a distinctly unmanly yelp of pain. She was much faster than those two when it came to taijutsu, but the second they landed a hit it was all over for her. The chakra surged under her skin, her hands started to shake with the effort.

Yamada reached the edge of the field yet again, a lazy eyed man with strangely coloured hair accompanying him. The bickering of Hatake's team could be heard in the distance. Yamada didn't dislike the copy-nin, but he hated asking him for help. "The chakra's getting blocked somewhere," he said, folding his arms and staring at the concentrating genin critically. "It's unstable. I thought maybe…" he let it trail off, eyes indiscreetly flicking to the forehead protector covering Kakashi's eye. The shorter man gave him a mild look.

"There!" Yamada said, pointing at the flash of blue between Raiku's trembling fingers. "See?"

Kakashi tilted his head, but gave no other indication of interest.

"Can you help or not?" Yamada asked with carefully restrained impatience.

'She might be like Gai's student,' Kakashi pointed out, hands casually stuck in his pockets.

Yamada grimaced. "Don't say that."

'Give her more time. She might not be cut out to be a genin at all,' Kakashi suggested, turning back around and slouching away. Yamada's eye twitched. "I haven't failed a genin yet," he muttered darkly to the man's retreating back. He sighed. "Speedy, get up and trade with shorty.'

Daisukenojo reluctantly tugged free of Ryuu's headlock, stumbling back a few steps. 'Raiku, c'mon,' he said when there was no response.

Raiku felt the familiar vibrations of Yamada's footsteps growing closer, the impacts jolting her hands slightly. "Speedy, get up," he prompted, standing over her with his hands on his hips. "Rest time is over."

She felt sweat break out on her forehead as the pressure refused to alleviate. Yamada reached down for her, giving the distinct impression he was about to roll his eyes.

There was the sudden snap of something important and brief weightlessness. There was a ringing in her ears drowning out everything else and pain as something slammed into her back. Every part of her hurt. Dimly she heard yells, felt hands on her shoulders. Through wavering vision she raised a hand and was surprised to see it stained red, the shreds of her sleeves covering skin that fizzled and sparked. She tried to open her mouth to speak and something warm spilled out to spread over the mask, blocking her air supply and sticking to her face in a way that made her sick. The fingers of her other hand twitched uselessly at her side.

'Raiku! Raiku stay awake!'

'Yamada's hurt! There's blood everywhere, what the hell do I do?!'

'Get to the hospital and get a medic you damn moron!'

A vague suggestion of a face in front of her pierced the dark. 'Raiku? Raiku, don't black out you idiot!'

Raiku was many things, but tough wasn't one of them. Her head fell to the side, and her eyes closed.

Ryuu shook her again, cursing as something burnt his hands. 'Hurry up Hatori!' he shouted after Daisukenojo.


	5. detonations and drawbacks

Raiku woke up by degrees, floating somewhere in the disembodied dark.

The smell was the first thing that pierced the fog. Antiseptic, soap and that strange, undefinable smell that pervades all hospitals came to her nose, instantly telling her where she was.

Shortly after that came touch. Rough fabric shifted lightly, grazing the pads of her fingers when they twitched reflexively. Dimly, she registered the foreign sensation of cool air on the backs of her hands.

After that came the pain. Deceptively mild, it wrapped itself around her limbs and weighed them down. Her brow creased, eyes screwing further shut.

A heart monitor beeped steadily, attached to the gauze covered patient prone on the sterile white hospital bed. Next to that peaceful scene, Raiku's heart monitor had an epileptic fit. It had lived a blameless life and now it was hooked up to a battery- it was less than pleased.

A suitably plain Gairano family member in the suitably plain white clothes of a medic leaned over from their post to adjust the volume on the monitor yet again, fully aware that Raiku was not in fact going into cardiac arrest. Other hand clenched firmly around a broom, they cast a wary eye at the door for Plots.

Raiku swallowed thickly, dry throat catching. She dragged a heavy eye open and the white ceiling swam into view as an indistinct blur. 'Raiku?' the Gairano woman asked quietly, leaning towards her from the chair questioningly. 'Raiku, can you hear me?'

She blinked sluggishly, turning her head and gasping at the sudden pain. 'Raiku,' the woman repeated, rising to her feet and placing a gloved hand on Raiku's gauze-bound forehead. 'Can you hear me?'

Raiku pulled the corners of her lips up into a weak smile, eyes half-closing in weariness. She nodded slightly. The woman smiled down at her warmly, the action making a plain face light up with sudden loveliness. 'Your father's worried about you, but he can't come in. You understand?'

Of course she did- it was far too melodramatic for a grief-stricken father to wait at her bedside, drawing too many parallels to his deceased wife. It prompted traumatised flashbacks and drama.

All the same, she thought as she nodded again, not trusting her dry and constricted throat to speak, it would have been nice to see him.

'I've been asked to tell you to keep your mouth shut,' the woman said with abrupt sternness, grey eyes flicking over Raiku's exposed face. 'And to give you this.'

Raiku sagged with relief at the sight of the black latex mask. 'We haven't been able to cover up your hair while you've been here,' the woman continued as she propped Raiku's head up to tie the back at the nape of her neck with brisk, efficient movements. 'So try to keep the boys away from your head.'

'I'll do my best,' she croaked painfully, wincing at the sound of her own voice. The woman nodded and gently set her head back down. 'Tell me where it hurts,' she instructed, setting her hands on her hips.

Raiku quirked a brow.

'Raiku,' the woman said warningly. Raiku's eye creased with her reflexive show of mirth. 'Just everywhere, Gairano,' she rasped wryly.

'My name's Mayuko,' the medic responded distractedly, lifting her safely covered arm and testing the elbow. 'You've accumulated some nasty injuries on your abdomen, not to mention you've strained... almost everything,' she criticised. 'You must have known the results of burning out your own chakra, Raiku. I don't want to see this become a habit,' she frowned.

'I didn- don't!' She jerked her arm, managing to flinch away feebly. Mayuko raised an eyebrow in return. 'You're just tired and strained, Raiku,' she sighed, rubbing her face wearily. 'You've got to be more careful. You can't channel chakra through vessels already completely preoccupied with...'

There it was- the trademark hesitation.

'Your condition,' she finished. Raiku coughed slightly, wincing. 'So I can't...?' she forced out, trailing off hopelessly.

'You can't,' Mayuko confirmed, eyes softening with sympathy. 'You may want to consider a different profession- especially after what you did to Yamada.'

'Yamada?' Raiku asked in alarm, eyes widening and trying to sit up. Mayuko put a hand out to her shoulder and pushed down firmly, gaze stern. 'You can see him when I say so and not before, understand?'

'What did I do to Yamada?' she persisted fearfully, breaths coming faster and irregular. 'Did I hurt him?'

_Did I kill him?_

She stamped on the thought. That sort of thing led to self-pity! That sort of thing led to Love Interests and tragic interludes!

'He's injured, but he's fine. Causing us all trouble,' she muttered darkly. 'And your teammates are waiting outside. One of them got a rather nasty shock- you  _need_  to be more careful, Raiku!' she scolded.

Raiku flinched under her unyielding gaze. Mayuko continued on, relentlessly. 'You can't afford to let your guard down, and you know that! Bio-generated electricity is far too unpredictable for you to be taking these sorts of risks!'

 _'Naruto_  gets to take as many risks as he  _wants_ ,' Raiku muttered sullenly.

' _Naruto_  is a tragedy and heroism Plot, and you know that perfectly well,' Mayuko retorted. 'Now do you want me to let the boys in or not? Because if you want to see them, you're going to have to behave.'

'Yes,' Raiku said reluctantly, gripping the bars on each side of the bed to push herself into a sitting position, the muscles in her back and arms screaming in protest. Mayuko nodded and crossed the room to the door, sliding it open smoothly. 'You two- she's awake.'

Raiku heard hurried footsteps, before they came to an abrupt halt. 'What's the big idea!?' the indignant voice of Daisukenojo exclaimed, blocked by Mayuko's rigid figure.

'You can't go barging in there and riling her up, you hear me!?' Mayuko demanded. 'You're going to be on your best behaviour-,'

'We know the rules,' Ryuu's bored voice interjected. 'We've been to hospitals before.'

'You give me attitude again and I'll remove something needlessly,' the medic grumped. 'Fine, in you go. And don't touch anything!' she added hastily as they pushed past her.

'You!' Daisukenojo said, standing at the foot of her bed with a livid expression. 'You have any idea how expensive it is to get bloodstains out! What kind of a jerk are you!?'

This wasn't what Raiku had been expecting. She'd expected some sort of cheesy throwback to the 'finding some common ground' comment, with her or Yamada being the common ground, but she was after all a creature of satire.

And it was common knowledge peddlers of satire have no souls.

'A ...jerk?' she offered lamely, brow wrinkling in confusion. Daisukenojo glowered at her unimpressively. Ryuu glared at her from just behind him, arms folded across his chest. Blood coated his dark shirt and led up his neck to frame the left side of his jaw, a smear of blood under his eye. 'It's. Everywhere,' he gritted out. 'And you blew a  _hole_  in Yamada. He only survived because there's so  _much_  to blow a hole through!'

She stared at him, eyes wide.

'Don't give me that look,' he grumbled. 'I'm not falling for that.'

Her eyes shone tearfully. 'I... I hurt Yamada?'

'Yes!' Ryuu maintained, finding it difficult at this point to maintain eye contact. Freakishly blue massive things...

'And you  _bled_  all  _over_  both of us!' Daisukenojo sputtered, not to be outdone. 'What the hell were you trying to pull? You exploded!'

'I... do that,' she said awkwardly, clearing her throat.

'Learn to control your damn chakra, or we're replacing you with someone else!' he threatened, face almost as red as his hair. 'Get me?'

'You sound like Yamada,' Ryuu criticised. Daisukenojo flinched. 'Shut up, moron,' he muttered defensively, folding his arms across his chest. 'We've been waiting here for days, little blue idiot,' he added to Raiku. 'My mother's gonna  _flip_  when she sees me.'

'You guys... didn't go home?' she asked falteringly. Daisukenojo gave her a scornful look. 'You're a member of our team, and Yamada's only in the next room! Like we were going to go home.  _And_  the nurses won't let us use the shower.'

Raiku blanched, eyes dragging over to Ryuu.

'That's right,' he said in answer to her unspoken question, relishing the next word: ' _days_.'

Raiku cringed in disgust, inching back. 'You... You can go home... Please go home,' she winced.

Ryuu's eye twitched. 'We wait here for ages and you tell us to go home!?'

'The reality of lovely gestures is lost on me when you haven't  _bathed_! Go get clean! CLEAN!' she exclaimed, breaking into a cough as she finished. 'Go!' she croaked, waving a hand.

'Ooooh no. We're not going without a  _hug_.' Daisukenojo said gleefully.

Raiku paled.

Ryuu gave him a nauseated look. 'That's right,' Daisukenojo maintained, expression gloating. 'You hate the touchy feely crap? Suck it up. If we have to smell bad, you have to smell bad.'

'Mercy,' she whimpered, holding her arms up defensively. She'd never been hugged in her life, and she wasn't going to start now.

Ryuu was catching on. 'Yeah,  _teammate_ ,' he said darkly, smirking. They moved with deadly efficiency.

Her first thought was that it was warm.

Vaguely uncomfortable, too, since she was contorted at an impossible angle to avoid their skin. 'Deal with it!' Daisukenojo gloated from somewhere near her left ear.

Her second thought was that it was... nice.

Granted, Ryuu's elbow was digging into her bent leg and they smelled awful.  _Awful_. But it was strangely safe, and completely new. Ryuu's breath fanned out against the skin of her neck, Daisukenojo's less lanky build keeping her in contented place. She was small and thus almost completely encompassed by their arms for a brief time, and as they pulled away she found herself missing the contact.

Not the smell though.

'And where the hell'd you even  _get_  that mask?' Daisukenojo asked gruffly, clearing his throat.

'Dad brought it,' she lied. He nodded. 'Well,' he said after an awkward silence. 'Now that you're as rank as us, we're going. C'mon, Ryuu.'

He sauntered out the door, Ryuu close behind. 'You found some common ground?' she called after him.

'Yeah. We both hate you bleeding on us,' he deadpanned, sliding the door closed.

She sighed.

It was a start.

She shifted back down on the bed, checking to make sure the room was clear before timidly lifting the blanket and pulling up her shirt to expose her stomach. She stifled a surge of disappointment at the sight of the bandages. She should've known she wouldn't be able to see the extent of the damage.

She turned onto her side with a grunt of pain, towards the window.

It was going to be a long couple of weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

The days passed slowly. Agonisingly slowly. The ceiling didn't get any more interesting, and even the periodic visits of her suddenly hygienic teammates couldn't stave off the boredom for long. After a few weeks of intense observation and medical suspicion, Raiku decided to leave. It simply gave her too much time for introspection.

Introspection was dangerous territory.

She peered around the doorway to her room, legs shaking slightly with chemically induced adrenaline, the effects of her last IV treatment. She was going to get out of this room if it  _killed her_.

She was a shinobi, she reminded herself. She could be stealthy.

She pulled the thin cotton hospital dressing gown tighter around her narrow shoulders and took a hesitant step onto the cold tiles, bare feet painfully conspicuous to her paranoid eyes.

She took another step, hunched in the middle of the hallway like some sort of hermit. Further down the corridor, another door creaked open. Slowly, an incredibly large man edged out of his room clad only in a hospital gown. Yamada held a finger to his lips, eyes darting around warily. She brightened at the sight of him, hand jerking up into a wave.

'Where do you think you're going Yamada?! Raiku!?' the waspish voice of Mayuko demanded from behind her, down the hall.

The ground shook.

"Run for it, Speedy!" Yamada shouted, taking off past her with a heavily gauze-wrapped chest. She yelped and ran after him, obeying the order out of habit rather than free will, sprinting down the sterile, sunlit hall and leaving a trail of partially melted footprints behind her, sparks flashing between the soles of her feet and the floor.

Mayuko stopped pursuing them with a curse, pulling out her standard issue Plot Prevent Radio, or PPR as they called them. 'I need a clean up at the hospital, code Raiku!' she snapped.

'Again?'

'Yes!'

"Don't you even think about overtaking me, kid!" he growled as she threatened to pass him, skidding around a corner. 'I'm sorry, but she knows where I live!' she panted, easily ducking under his arm and vanishing into the distance.

"Damnit!" he cursed, slowing at the entrance to the staff-room, head whipping around to stare at the direction Mayuko would presumably come from. No sight of her. Something occurred to him as someone tried in vain to edge past him into the room he currently blocked. "And where the  _hell_  are my clothes!?" he barked to the intern, who reached roughly the level of his waist. She cowered fearfully, eyes bugging out of her head. The pale young woman stammered something unintelligible.

"What's wrong? Am I speaking your language, girl!?"

She covered her eyes with a shaking hand, pointing tremulously with the other.

There was a suspicious breeze. He looked down, slowly.

"Oh you are going to PAY FOR THIS GAIRANO!" his roar echoed after her. She lowered her head and increased her speed.

'I SAW NOTHING!' she screamed back.  _I saw everything_ , she thought to herself grimly as she leapt down the fire escape, the metal grille cutting into her bare feet. That particular image was going to take some work to get rid of. She landed on the ladder to the ground floor, emitting a small scream when it shot downwards sharply, metal moving under her fingers and catching on her gloves. She jolted with the impact and clambered down clumsily to the alley next to the hospital, yanking the caught threads free with an ominous ripping sound.

The wall to her left exploded.

The air was immediately thick with dust, rubble spraying out with the force of impact to slam into the wall on her other side with a series of cracks and thuds. She landed on her back hard, fabric ripping and skin tearing on the concrete and brick fragments.

Raiku struggled onto her hands, breaths sucking dust into her lungs and choking her. She spluttered weakly, trying to cover her mouth.

"So," Yamada gloated. "Thought you could get one over on me, did you now!?"

'Did you just destroy part of the hospital!? Just you just destroy a wall so you could catch me!? Are you insane?!' she exclaimed, horrified. He stood over her menacingly. "Don't you change the subject!"

'Subject? What subject!?'

"The subject of what we're going to do with you, get me!?"

She paled.

Given he was covered in brick dust and small pieces of debris, that seemed reasonable. The man had a hole in his chest primarily filled with gauze, and was still hardy enough to crash through walls.

Insane.

"You, Speedy, have a lot of explaining to do," he said firmly, the expression on his face brooking no argument. "And you'd better start with the explosions."

'I ... explode sometimes?' she offered weakly from her position on the ground.

"Come on, speedy, I'll buy you some lunch and you can tell me all about it," he said, gesturing she should leave the alley first.

She nodded reluctantly and struggled to her feet, brushing off her hands with a wince. More scrapes. That combined with the burns on her abdomen was going to be an annoying few weeks. Raiku ducked under his arm and exited the alley onto the busy Konoha street, fresh air finally reaching her deprived lungs. She breathed in deeply, contented.

"Smell the roses later, kid," Yamada reminded her, patting her on the shoulder and jerking his thumb towards the left. "I know a great ramen place."

'No!' she said hastily, jerking back. 'I... I hate ramen!'

He gave her a deeply suspicious look.

She broke into a nervous sweat. She didn't want to meet Naruto and bond! Bonding was a class five risk!

"Suck it up," he said, sealing both their fates. "Talk as we walk." Raiku walked slowly down the street, hot summer sun warming the concrete to the point of singeing her feet slightly. Face downcast, she sighed heavily. 'What do you want to know?'

"For a start," he said slowly, waving at a woman hanging out her laundry. "I wanna know how you made yourself explode. I'm guessing," he said, giving her clothes a pointed look. "It's the same reason you're dressed like a monk in this sorta heat."

'Yeah,' she muttered. 'I'm ... different. My skin makes... electricity. Not my skin. But it comes out through my skin. My family said I can't channel chakra through my hands or out of my body properly while it's preoccupied with... the electricity. I can't touch anybody, or it hurts them really badly.'

"So the chakra flow burnt out trying to get past the electricity," he mused, eyes distant. "Solution seems pretty simple, Speedy," he said slowly. "We've just gotta improvise with what you've got."

'Lightning skin?' she asked glumly.

"No," he said, cuffing her on the back of the head with a blow that almost sent her flying to the ground. "Don't feel sorry for yourself, that's stupid, you get me?"

'I get you,' she said, squaring her shoulders. He nodded approvingly. "We're going to pretend you're using lightning techniques. Think you can get your family to pretend they're family secrets?" he asked.

'I think I can manage that,' she said dryly.  
A Plot scurried behind her, trying desperately to find a place for her in the world of the conflicted.

'We're good with secrets,' she added.

He grinned proudly. "We're gonna work on this as much as it takes. Who knows, maybe one day you'll be able to touch someone!"

She smiled brightly up at him, eyes creasing with happiness. 'I'd like that,' she said sweetly.

He smiled back down at her, the two caught in a moment of mutual understanding and secrecy. "I think this just might work out."


	6. Gairano assignment

Several weeks after her impromptu escape and the lapsing of her teammates into a sort of uneasy peace, Raiku was called before the head of their family. Weeks of extra training and grueling physical punishment under the guise of preparation from Yamada had made even what seemed like an innocuous request highly suspicious, and she made her way to the official meeting point with her guard up and her paranoia in full force.

Raiku sat at the short desk, long spindly legs bent painfully to fit under it. She stared from her tiny chair up at the Gairano family patriarch, his brown eyes looking back without a shred of mercy visible within.

'Hey Dad,' she greeted.

'Raiku,' he nodded. He took a few casual steps towards the blackboard behind him, upon which was written a familiar list. The room they were in had no windows, a single steel door and almost painfully bright lighting to make everything look even more sparse than it already was. The room contained only the blackboard, the chair and desk that Raiku used now.

He extended the stainless steel pointer and gestured to the first item on the list. 'I think you've already forgotten several very important lessons during your short time as a shinobi. First duty of a Gairano is what?'

'"Use any means necessary to avoid the grasp of the Genematrix",' she supplied promptly.

His eyes glinted. 'Second duty?'

'"Stay away from that Naruto boy, we know trouble when we see it".'

'Good,' he said, jerking the pointer down to the third. 'Third duty?'

'"No brooding, but for in the compulsory brooding times of four until five every second weekday",' she answered.

'Fourth?'

'"Absolutely no shinobi Love Interests".'

'Fifth?'

'"Avoid all traumatic incidents and remain emotionally optimistic to avoid drama".'

'Sixth?'

Raiku opened her mouth, then paused. She frowned. 'There is no sixth duty.'

'There is now,' he said grimly, whipping the pointer up to the new role emblazoned on the blackboard. 'So the sixth duty is?'

'"Raiku",' she read, expression dubious. '"Keep your damn hands to yourself",' she sighed. 'Is that really necessary?'

'Clearly,' he said firmly. 'I got a message from Yamada today. You're going to be  _training_  this power of yours. Does that seem like a bad idea to you? Because it seems like a bad idea to us.'

She gaped at him. 'It'll let me stay as a shinobi! It'll allow me to maybe not have to dress like a nun!'

'It'll make you an unbalanced character,' he warned disapprovingly. 'Think about it.'

'I honestly don't see how this could be a bad thing,' she said stubbornly.

'Think of Naruto learning how to harness his Kyuubi power,' he prompted, collapsing the pointer and sliding it into a pocket.

'That's hardly the same thing!' she protested. 'That'll make him undefeatable! This'll just make me cooler in the summer!'

He studied her with shrewd eyes. 'That's all you want to learn?' he asked suspiciously.

'Yes!' she said, exasperated.

There was a long silence as they glared at each other.

'You've got an assignment,' he said eventually, looking away. Raiku relished the small victory, her own electric blue gaze still smugly resting on his face. 'Where?'

'Downtown. Family member gone AWOL,' he said, scratching the side of his nose absently. She nodded sagely. That was the problem when a member of the family decided to seize their own Plot- the ability to see them meant they could pick and choose the end they wanted, which may entail unpleasant means. The most dramatic Plots usually involved civic destruction and deaths, which of course the Gairano family was billed for.

In fact, the Gairano family was billed for  _everything_. The destruction caused by the sealing of the Kyuubi? Billed. The funeral expenses of the Yondaime that fell that day? Billed. The only reason civic utilities were kept so inexpensive was the fact that the Gairano family was paying for most of them to be repaired constantly.

Naruto was undoubtedly the biggest drain on their resources. The Gairano accountants cursed the day that blonde boy got it in his head to be a shinobi, but nonetheless paid for his education behind his back and found themselves receiving countless bills for ramen once Ichiraku found out their mailing address.

The ability to pay for it stemmed from the endless supply of low-brow missions they made it their jobs to receive. And while every time a high-class missing-nin came to town there were more Gairano casualties than anyone else, that was an acceptable risk.

The only thing the Gairano asked of the administrative offices of the Hokage was the ability and freedom to pursue their calling when it didn't interfere with their job- the maintaining of the separation from the Genematrix. Which meant if this particular family member gone AWOL refused to reject or withdraw from their plot there was the distinct possibility that they would be killed, their body dragged to an unmarked grave and their family left uninformed as to their fate.

To leave the family didn't mean the family left you.

'Her name's Mura,' her father said, waving a dismissive hand to give her permission to escape the tiny, constricting desk. 'Typical A-motive, she's gone for a longwinded and dramatic plot.'

A-motive: the most common motive of any sort of Gairano Plot-thief.

Love.

Being a Gairano meant a life free from torture and drama, but it also meant a life free of great loves and captivating Love Interests. Being a Gairano could be lonely, especially when the Gairano chose to be a shinobi. Being a Gairano shinobi meant maintaining a huge emotional distance, simply because the average shinobi could transmit Drama over distances up to a hundred miles.

Raiku nodded slowly, absorbing the information. 'We have a lock on the Interest she's hijacked?' she asked after a moment. He nodded. 'Jounin by the name of Shiranui Genma. He won't get in your way, so you're not at risk. Early days of the plot,' he added by way of explanation.

'What do you want me to do?' she asked. He shrugged. 'She's a good kid- she just got lonely. Convince her to come home.'

Raiku had never been asked to kill anyone, but it was only a matter of time. She didn't view it with contempt- she'd been raised to not really have strong views on anything. Views, as everyone knew, led to Stances on things, and those were far more trouble than they were worth.

A lifestyle this boring took endless work to maintain.

Instead Raiku had been raised to believe that as everyone died, killing was simply speeding up the natural process. Human life had value, of course, because to believe anything else led to Angst-Plots and Drama Rankings, but that value was a matter of perspective.

Everything was a matter of perspective.

'I've gotten you the address,' her father added, sliding a piece of paper over to her. 'Anyone asks, you tell them the truth: you're visiting a family member.'

'Got it.'

'You can stop by after training.'

'I'm training late,' she reminded him instantly. 'Extra training, remember?'

He rolled his eyes. 'After that, then.'

'What if it runs even later?'

'Make sure it doesn't.'

'But what if it  _does_?'

'Then wake her up!' he exclaimed in frustration. 'She knows you're coming, and seeing it's you instead of one of our Equalisers should be a relief for her!'

"Equalisers". Private equivalents of ANBU, who skulked around assassinating unbalanced characters and stopping the great Plot from coming to fruition until Naruto was ready. Equalisers, the personal enforcers of the Gairano family who quietly and quickly dispatched the cronies of each Nemesis to allow a dramatic confrontation to take place with their Protagonist.

Also, coincidentally, the silent dispatchers of Plot Abusers.

'Alright,' she said reluctantly, tightening the band around her wrist. 'Anything else?'

'Drink plenty of water. Today's going to be very hot and the last thing you need is another stay in hospital,' he advised, stifling a grin and receiving a vile look in response. 'We can't afford to keep replacing walls.'

'Got it,' she grumbled unhappily, yanking her forehead protector on with a distinctly disgruntled air. It was useless to try and point out that Yamada had broken the wall and every Gairano hated useless statements.

It came from years of exposure to monologues.

'Now get out of here before I change my mind,' he said, flapping his hands at her dismissively. She raised an eyebrow but complied, yanking the heavy steel open with some difficulty and squeezing through the small gap out into the hall.

It really looked out of place, this steel door in the middle of a normal home. But secret entrances and secret rooms were for the interesting folk that inhabited the rest of Konoha. She padded down the simple wooden hall, stretching in the wide rays of sunshine entering through the windows. She paused to put on her shoes, before she stepped outside.

Into the smog.

She choked in a mixture of physical incapacitation and indignant shock, hand coming up to tug her mask into place. Marginally appeased, she looked around. Numerous queasy Gairano family members were going about their business with masks similar to hers on green faces. 'Plot,' someone wheezed in explanation as they passed, catching sight of her horrified look. 'Big one. Careless puncture, you know how it is.'

She shook her head in disbelief, pushing the gates open and skidding down the rock face. A few metres down she broke out of the smog and into fresh air, the effects lost on her through the mask. As usual, her waiting teammate got showered with pebbles.

More unusually, so did the other one.

'Why don't you people buy some stairs?' Ryuu asked indignantly, brushing dirt clods out of his hair. 'You've got a fortress up there but you couldn't install an access point?'

Raiku stared at him, legs still bent to absorb the impact of landing, hands out at her side to help her balance.

'Well?' he demanded.

'It's no use, man, she'll just laugh it off,' Daisukenojo pointed out, casting her a dirty look. She stared at them in mute surprise.

'Let's go,' Daisukenojo said to Ryuu, turning and slouching off in the direction of the training grounds. 'Sure,' Ryuu agreed mildly, following after him with considerably better posture.

For a moment she simply couldn't bring herself to react, caught under the spell of the surreal that seeing her two teammates getting along had cast over her. Then it shattered when a loud and to her ears, suddenly obnoxious voice called back for her. 'Coming!' she called instantly, running after the two boys. 'Why did you both come to get me!?' she yelled after them, swerving around a corner only to see their backs vanish around another.

There was a muffled and unintelligible response.

She cursed and sped up, quick steps bringing her level with them just as they reached the grassy path to the training fields. 'I didn't catch that?' she pressed when they gave no indication of wanting to respond.

'We wanted to make sure you hadn't killed yourself,' Ryuu repeated slowly, as though talking to a small child.

'Yeah. Those toasters are dangerous things,' Daisukenojo deadpanned.

Raiku flushed with anger. 'I made one mistake and suddenly I'm the accident magnet!?' she demanded.

'Yeah, that's about right,' Ryuu answered, casually kicking a rock towards a group of rookies practicing with kunai.

'You're the one who feels the pathological urge to pick on rookies!' she protested.

'On purpose,' he pointed out. 'I've never terrorised them by accident.'

' _One_  mistake,' she grumbled under her breath, shoving her hands in her pockets sullenly. ' _One_.'

"Good  _morning_ , ladies!" Yamada grinned at them over his shoulder, facing the wide, blank expanse of the training field. "I trust you all slept well? Didn't brain yourself with a toaster or anything, Speedy?"

'ONE! One mistake!'

"Good to hear it! Since our last taijutsu session was interrupted, not that I'm naming names, we're going to be continuing on that note today," he said cheerfully, easily brushing off her frustration. "For obvious reasons, Raiku's going to be one of the two fighting first."

Raiku cracked her knuckles menacingly. Daisukenojo swallowed, hard. Raiku wasn't strong, but she was fast as all hell and he just  _knew-_

"Shorty, you'll be her partner, get me?" Yamada grinned.

Raiku shot an evil glare to her short teammate from the corner of her eye. She had a lovely suspicion this was going to be fun.

"Ryuu, I've got a jutsu I want you to practice until then, so over here. We'll leave the lovebirds to it," Yamada said, clapping Ryuu on the shoulder. Raiku noticed that to his credit, he didn't flinch upon impact, just nodded and walked to the edge of the field.

Raiku turned to Daisukenojo and assumed a look of truly malevolent intent, looking down at him as she stretched her fingers individually.

She stifled a surge of resentment as he simply scoffed at her. 'Bring it on,' he said, settling into an offensive stance and curling his fingers in provocation.

Raiku settled her feet, sliding them outwards to just outside of the width of her hips, bending her knees slightly.

There was a brief pause filled only with the wind rustling through the leaves of the tree surrounding them and the rustling of the long grass, before they both struck at once. She anticipated the low kick Daisukenojo used too often and slammed her foot downwards onto the side of his knee, immediately shifting her weight to his unprotected left side and sending her elbow towards his ear. Forced immediately onto the defensive, Daisukenojo blocked the blow with his hand and grabbed her sleeve, twisting her arm behind her back. Twisting violently in favour of the move, she used the momentum to yank him off-balance to the space immediately behind her.

He stumbled and recovered with admirable speed, cursing as Yamada called out, "one!" from somewhere behind them- one opportunity for the opponent to kill him.

Raiku danced back several steps, forcing her muscles to relax. She reminded herself someone of her build couldn't afford to rely on physical strength, and dragged her hands up in front of her. It went against what Iruka had taught them in drills, but Yamada would be watching her to make sure she was taking in his advice.

Daisukenojo's eyes flicked over her warily- she smiled freely under the mask, not bothering to alert him by creasing her eyes. That would teach him to mock her common sense.

Under the violently red hair, Daisukenojo was starting to sweat bullets. He  _knew_  she was going to be trouble, he just  _knew_  it. All that extra training Yamada was giving her… it had to be to make up for her lack of chakra with taijutsu! He maintained his shrewd expression, wanting nothing more than to just reach out and rip that mask off to try and catch wind of her expression. Anything to give him an inkling of what she was planning.

The sparring sessions went until one of them had accrued three losses. Ryuu was by far the most balanced, taking far longer for either side to win. Raiku had yet to have to fight Daisukenojo for more than an hour.

She feinted to her left and Daisukenojo instantly raised an arm defensively to the level of his chest, shifting to his right to intercept an attack that wasn't coming. She threw her own forearm up and hooked his wrist, pulling down with the left hand and sending the right flying towards his nose. He jerked his head to the side, her palm barely catching his ear. He grunted in pain, his captured arm bending to send an elbow into her chest. She choked, momentarily stunned, and grasped a handful of his hair.

He gave what to her sounded like an embarrassingly unmanly yelp, free hand coming up to grip her wrist so tightly she felt bone move against bone. Locked against each other, one each holding the arm of the other, they waiting for a moment, each trying to think of the quickest way free.

Raiku threw her head forward, forehead protector slamming into his own, unprotected head.

"Two!" she heard Yamada respond immediately as Daisukenojo fell backwards, almost dragging her to the ground as she suddenly took on half of his weight.

He groaned in pain, freeing her wrist to her profound relief and putting his hand on his forehead. The skin was already red darkening to purple- a sure sign of what was going to be an impressive bruise.

Raiku twisted her other arm free and stepped back, assuming her simple stance with slightly raised arms yet again.

He staggered, squinting at her. With a great deal of satisfaction, she grinned at him.

With a growl he lunged for her again.

The sun reached its peak and began to descend unheeded as the three continued to fight furiously, at one point forcibly pulled apart by Yamada when a casual spar turned into a personal vendetta. He watched them with a mixture of pride and amusement; he'd never believed in drills, finding them to encourage a standard response rather than what may have been more effective, but these three had responded to intense partner work with almost frightening rates of improvement. Daisukenojo was by far the strongest, built the heaviest despite being the closest to the ground, but Raiku was by far the fastest, a fact he no longer wondered about. Ryuu was the most balanced and held his own with admirable efficiency, possessing the greatest stamina. Though none of the three were good on their own, as yet only having untapped potential, they would one day make a truly formidable team.

The amusement stemmed from their absolutely vehement dislike of losing. Raiku's flexibility and speed kept the other two constantly frustrated, hands encountering air instead of flesh. Daisukenojo's advantage was the opposite, forcing the other two to give up their natural advantages to hit him as hard as they could by sheer refusal to lose. Ryuu simply found a weakness and ruthlessly pursued it with almost fanatical tenacity, only abandoning it when another was found.

They all, Yamada suspected, hated each other a little. However they refused to stop liking each other simply because it would give the others too much satisfaction to see them squirm, which left them with an interesting conundrum.

When the rays of the sun began to fade to red from brilliant gold, Yamada called for a halt. Exhausted, Daisukenojo and Ryuu dragged themselves away from each other. Raiku, who sat with her back to all three of them, let her head fall back to allow her to look at them upside down. "You all did well today!" Yamada congratulated them. Raiku felt a twinge of pride, only muted by the numerous bruises she sported. The burns on her stomach were throbbing ominously, her muscles screaming at her. To her weary eyes, Yamada's grin was frightening, a sign he was going to push them even harder tomorrow.

"You've all earned yourself some early leave- we go on a mission tomorrow, so you may as well get some rest anyway, get me?"

Raiku shuddered as the memory of the last mission surfaced. The remembered phantom drool cooled her forehead under the protector slightly.

"Go on, you two," Yamada addressed the boys. "Speedy's gotta stay for extra training."

They looked over at her with stares of demonic glee.

She shot them a poisonous, upside-down look.

'See you later, Yamada,' Daisukenojo nodded, putting his hands in his pockets and making his way back down the hill to the village with a pronounced limp.

Raiku noted the limp with savage pride. She'd made him pay for getting away early in advance. 'Bye Yamada, Raiku,' Ryuu nodded to them courteously, managing to convey a sense of boredom even as he turned his back and left.

He could  _exude_  it. It was a gift she suspected he'd cultivated.

"Well," Yamada said, rubbing his hands together briskly once the other two were safely gone, resembling the devil himself in the red light of the setting sun. "Let's get to work."

Raiku nodded shortly, standing and pulling her gloves off, dropping them onto the grass. She peeled her mask off her face and left it gathered around her neck, slipping her forehead protector off and rolling up her sleeves.

In the rapidly fading light, her skin glowed.

Yamada's face was set into uncharacteristic seriousness. "You got it, Speedy?"

She looked down at her hands, tilting her head slightly as she watched the glow steadily grow brighter, coalescing into streaks of lightning dancing over her skin. 'Yes,' she responded simply.

He nodded. "Push it down."

She pushed her shoes off and kicked them to a few feet away, sliding her leg bindings up to her knees. The electricity immediately started to crackle to life, scorching the ground around her toes.

"Does it hurt?" he asked, eyeing it. It took a lot of getting used to.

'No,' she said mildly, the faintly cheerful expression affixed to her face as always. It never hurt. She felt the truth of it pushing at the back of her mind and shoved it further away.

"Alright, Speedy," Yamada said quietly, stern gaze meeting hers head on. "No screw ups, get me?"

Raiku nodded.

"Good. Now," he said, turning to his left and eyeing a particularly provocative tree. "That one."

Raiku threw her hands out in front of her, releasing as much force as she dared in one blow. The force of it screamed through her arms and exploded into life as a bolt of electricity easily the width of herself shrieked through the air with blinding speed. The tree cracked open and vanished, splinters rending the air and settling into a blast radius of several metres.

Raiku let her arms fall to her sides, crackling faintly. Yamada looked at her from the corner of his eye, still facing the remains of the tree. "Anything?"

She looked down at her hands, still glowing. 'No,' she said eventually.

He nodded, more to himself than her it seemed. 'It's not throwing it out,' she explained after a moment's thought. 'It feels more like letting it out.'

It had taken weeks to get to the point where she could describe even that, she reflected. Then she caught the pity and yanked it up short, mustering a sheepish smile and scratching the back of her head. 'What do you think?'

"Look, Speedy," he said slowly, staring into the distance and deep in thought. "As far as I can see you're always producing it, get me?"

She nodded.

"So," he continued. "When you're  _not_  doing that-," he gestured to the tree at that point, "it's because you're telling yourself not to."

She nodded again, steadily drawing her own conclusions. "The ability to tell yourself not to let it out to your skin at all is gonna be something you do on your own, get me?" Yamada said to her after a moment of silence. "But the training should help. Teaching you how to use it better might teach you how to control it more in general."

He waited for her response.

She smiled up at him brightly, and not for the first time he noticed the faint blue glow from behind her teeth as electricity painted the roof of her mouth. 'Thanks, but I think I'll try it on my own,' she said cheerfully. That was a lie, it just wasn't wise for her to become too good at anything.

To her profound relief he seemed to accept the answer. "Well speedy, get a good night's sleep," he said, stretching his arms over his head and making himself momentarily taller than the rest of the forest in the process. "Like I said- mission tomorrow."

'Got it!' she said happily, giving him a proud, two-fingered salute. He rolled his eyes at her. Raiku started to pull on her various coverings as he walked away, already, fishing with one hand in a pocket for the Plot Abuser's address. She'd get as much sleep as she can, but for now she had a job to do.

Ruefully, she wondered if Naruto ever had this many things to take care of.


	7. Gairano assignment complete

Raiku made her way downtown with easily feigned nonchalance- the freedom granted by a secure alibi infiltrating her natural wariness. The artificial light cast the streets in warm yellow glow, interrupted by deep shadows that other shinobi periodically occupied. The still busy streets were filled with mostly chuunin relieved from duty with the setting of the sun and civilians hoping to catch their attention, the smells of cooking and sounds of easy conversation permeating the air.

Distantly, Raiku hoped this Mura would come home willingly. It was a nice night, and the summer heat was split by a pleasant breeze for the first time in weeks. To end a nice night on a sour note like that would be… regrettable.

She fished around in her pocket for the address, pulling the wrinkled piece of paper out and double-checking the contents. Her eyes flicked to the apartment building across the street from her, dotted with advertisements and vague remnants of graffiti. She tilted her head curiously, the paper crushed into her pocket once more. This was what she'd expected in terms of budget, but not location. It was rare for a Gairano, even a Plot Abuser, to choose an area so densely populated. It made them nervous and easier to pick off, since they were usually such solitary creatures.

She had no reason to be nervous. A-motives had a specific script, even, that usually could be used with reasonably consistent effectiveness. If she stuck to it, she'd be fine.

Someone brushed past her impatiently, carrying a laden tray towards a table. She began to apologise out of reflex, and realised it would draw more attention to her than not doing so. She looked down at herself. A black latex mask stretched up from the ANBU style shirt she'd worn most of her life, her arms covered with sleeves of the same colour sewn on as an afterthought. Her hands were gloved, her forehead covered with the Konoha protector. Her dark grey pants reached her knees and the rest of her was covered in identical black fabric- she cringed in sudden understanding.

She looked like an ANBU.

And if there was one thing ANBU certainly  _didn't_  do, it was stand in the middle of a downtown street and apologise.

She squared her shoulders, resolved to buy some red socks or  _something_ colourful, and crossed the street towards the intercom. Her target was situated on the third floor, made obvious by the glaring lack of a label on the corresponding button- no one wanted the Equalisers to have an easy job. No one liked Equalisers, especially not the Equalisers themselves. Where did they even come from? But no, she was getting off-target. She assumed a worried expression, shoulders slumping, adopting the persona of a stressed shinobi. A stressed shinobi who had locked themselves out- frying the lock in the middle of a public street would be an incredibly  _bad_  idea. That and there was always the chance the lock would melt closed.

It took twenty minutes for an opportunity to present itself, in the form of a woman whose determined if unsteady path painted a line of intent to the apartment complex door. 'Excuse me,' she said cheerfully to the woman in question, who was currently struggling to juggle both groceries and her keys, recognising the skewed path for what it was. 'Would you like some help, miss?'

Hidden behind brown grocery bags, there was an audible pause. 'Sure,' the woman said eventually, fingers straining to hold out her keys without dropping anything.

Raiku accepted them and quickly unlocked the door, stepping inside casually to hold it open for her. 'Are you sure you wouldn't like me to carry anything for you?'

'No, thank you,' the woman said with strangely reluctant gratitude.

 _Maybe a shirt that says "genin" on it_ , Raiku thought wearily.  _Maybe that'll do the trick._

'Have a nice night then!' she said instead, creasing her eyes happily and moving towards the door. The woman awkwardly made her way up the steps, failing to notice Raiku simply stepping under the second flight of stairs as the door closed. Raiku waited until both the rustling of paper and the footsteps disappeared with the click of a lock and some mild cursing, leaning out to look up the stairwell. There were six floors in total, and no sight or sound of a tenant at the current.

She padded casually up the stairs, frame purposefully relaxed. Walk, she knew. Walk, not run. If you look like you have the right to be there, people will assume you do, as time had proven for her.

As she rounded the corner to the stairs leading to the third floor, she absently tugged a glove off with her teeth, flexing her bare fingers in the warm air in preparation. She reached the top and scanned the doors, quickly finding the one she sought and approaching with a deceptive sense of entitlement. She cast a casual glance in either direction in front of the plain wooden door, reaching out with to press bar fingertips to the door. Metal was a superior conductor to wood, and after a moment, there was a distinct crack from within the frame.

Whistling quietly, she tugged the door open and slid it closed behind her, leaving her in the dim apartment. The open windows overlooking the street allowed the light of the streetlamps and storefronts to filter into the dark, illuminating a sparse apartment.

Raiku raised an eyebrow, dispassionate eyes scanning over the simple furniture. There were very few personal touches, she noted as she once again pulled on her glove, sparks leaping unhappily from the skin in protest. She absently traced a gloved finger over a framed picture sitting on top of a bookshelf as she passed, the photo within one of a handsome brunette man in his twenties, chewing on a senbon with an arm slung casually over the shoulder of a lovely woman with solemn grey eyes.

She supposed that was Shiranui Genma in the photo there with Gairano Mura.

Her eyes took in the glowing red display of a digital clock as she settled into a vaguely uncomfortable chair facing the door. 6 o'clock came and went as she sat there in the dark, purposefully not thinking about anything, especially not about the unpleasant feeling churning in her stomach.

She hated A-Motives.

She didn't know why, but something about them grabbed something in her chest and twisted painfully, leaving her with a strange, foreign sensation in the aftermath.

The clock told her it was nearing 7 o'clock when Gairano Mura finally came home. She was still laughing as she stumbled in through the door, slipping her shoes off so quickly she almost stumbled as she tried to do both that and find the light switch at the same time. Her face was lit up with joy until the exact moment she saw Raiku sitting directly across from her.

The happiness bled from her face.

Raiku creased her eyes in a cheerful, friendly manner, gesturing with a black clad hand to a seat placed near her own. 'Hello. May I speak with you?'

Mura stared at her, face ashen and hands beginning to shake. Raiku tilted her head in question, eyes still creased into that fake smile. 'Please, sit,' she repeated, as though it were her home and Mura a reluctant guest. It may as well have been true: as the current representative of the Gairano family and all the unpleasant extensions it involved itself with, Raiku was by far the senior in power in the situation, even if she was bluffing desperately.

Shaking, movements jerky, Mura made her way over to the chair in question, hands smoothing her pants in what seemed to be a nervous habit. Raiku allowed her eyes to flick over the older woman's slightly rumpled clothes. She looked nice, she reflected, in a dark grey shirt and simple skirt. Elegant, even.

'Mura, our family has sent me to see you,' she said pleasantly, folding her hands in her lap. Mura nodded weakly, eyes wide and unblinking. 'They want to know why you've broken the rules.'

The woman stared at her mutely, and something in her eyes pleaded with Raiku. But Raiku was only twelve, and hadn't experienced anything that Mura had betrayed the family for. Her blue eyes stared at her with only mild, dispassionate curiosity.

'Mura?' Raiku prompted gently, seeing she had no intention of answering. The other woman jerked almost violently, shaken out of some internal thought process. 'I just…' she began falteringly, then stopped. To Raiku's supreme horror, her eyes grew shiny with tears. The script did not mention how horrifying feelings were.

Raiku felt there was a point of clarification necessary here. 'Mura, I am not an Equaliser,' she said quietly, trying to get things back on track.

Mura cracked under the pressure of her own relief. 'Thank you,' she whispered, burying her face in her hands. 'Thank you.'

Raiku didn't feel that not killing someone was something to be thanked for. She cleared her throat awkwardly, wanting to speed things along. She'd been sent on jobs exactly like this for people closer to her own age many times before- teens were repeat offenders, but this was evidently some kind of test, and she didn't intend to fail.

'Mura...'

Mura nodded into her hands, wiping her eyes roughly. 'You'll get sick of it,' she forced out, voice thick with some emotion Raiku didn't recognise. 'You'll get sick of denying everything. You'll get sick of watching the people  _you_  want to be with thrown into Plots and coming out so damn  _happy_.'

She looked up at last, eyes red. 'And you know what?' she asked, perilously close to tears again already. 'Some people don't  _get_  Plots. And they spend all their lives  _looking_  for them and  _looking_  for what we spend all our time avoiding! They know they're missing something and they try and fill the gap with everything that doesn't fit!'

Raiku tilted her head in the opposite direction. 'You're referring to Shiranui Genma?'

Mura flinched. Raiku wondered if it was the sound of that man's name coming from a representative of Gairano.

'Yes,' she managed eventually, fingers twisting themselves in her lap. The only response she could read on Raiku's face was the sudden blink. 'You seized a Plot in order to become the Love Interest of Shiranui Genma?' the girl reiterated.

'Yes,' Mura repeated quietly.

'You did this out of… compassion?' Raiku pressed on with casual insensitivity, mostly because she didn't believe it for a second. Her nausea was morphing into something more unpleasant, but just as unsettling.

'Yes.'

Raiku nodded. 'I see.' She leant forward, brilliant eyes searching Mura's intently. 'You know you have to come home,' she said with quiet earnest. 'You know we can't let you twist things.'

'Please,' Mura asked. 'Please just let me have this one thing. He deserves it!' she added in sudden, unexpected conviction.

'That isn't for you to decide,' Raiku said simply. 'If you come home, he'll be fine. If you don't, he'll miss a loved one when the Equalisers come after you.'

'Isn't it better to have loved and lost?' Mura offered her, but Raiku recognised the signs of a woman about to crack.

'He can't miss what hasn't happened yet,' she responded, but-

'That's a lie!' Mura spat, throwing an arm out in passionate gesticulation. 'You know that's a lie! You just spend your life searching for anything that'll take the place of what you miss!'

'Mura, you have to come home,' Raiku said firmly, easily evading the flailing arm. 'This won't help anything.'

'If you take me away he'll never find someone else!' Mura exclaimed, voice pleading with her.

'That's not your role,' Raiku explained, reading from the script in her head. 'Mura, you must come home with me or you will die.'

Mura flinched again.

Ruthlessly Raiku pressed on, sensing weakness but also feeling a surge of genuine anger, just for a moment. 'You've stolen a Plot in order to fulfill your own goals. What he'll experience is not love. It's narrative obligation. You're taking away his free will.'

All Plots did. But there was no possible excuse for one of them to do the same.

Abruptly, her eyes creased to indicate an inappropriately sweet smile. 'So shall we go home, Mura?'

The woman just looked at her for a while, and Raiku found herself with the opportunity to actually observe the fight going out of someone's eyes.

'I need time to pack,' Mura said after the extended silence, dropping her gaze.

Raiku nodded, standing in a movement so sudden Mura almost threw herself back onto the ground, chair and all. 'I'll see you at home, Mura! You should return by midnight, so you have plenty of time to notify the family,' Raiku said with newfound cheer, dusting off her hands. 'You will be reimbursed for the lock,' she added as she padded towards the door. Her stomach rumbled only once she had reached the safety of the stairwell, reminding her in no uncertain terms that it was still in control around here and it wanted a raise.

She sighed, stretching out the kinks in her neck and rubbing the back of her head awkwardly. She hated A-Motives.

They were always so earnest.

Three flights of stairs later she pushed open the door, once again finding herself in the middle of a busy downtown street. As laughter reached her ears, she looked around for somewhere to eat. But genin weren't exactly sources of wealth, and she found herself grimacing in pain at the sight of the prices within immediate visual range.

It was starting to look like it was instant miso again.

She hung her head sheepishly. It had been a tragically interesting couple of weeks, she should at least be able to eat out. But no, nothing like that for Raiku.

She put her hands in her pockets to dissuade enterprising pickpockets and made her way through the crowds and bustling streets, mourning the inaccessibility of the delicious food surrounding her.

If she noticed a man with brown hair and a senbon hanging from his lips sitting alone and waiting for someone for someone who wasn't coming, she gave no indication. Raiku just kept to her path out of the busy downtown, and wondered why there was something at the back of her mind that stung.


	8. beauty and scorch marks

The 'mission' was to the hidden village of the Sand, and Raiku felt her heart break. It made itself known through a pained whimper. Sand? In these clothes? These clothes… in the desert? Sand and electricity at once? There were far too many things that were already wrong with this mission.

"That's right, ladies-  _Sand_ ,' Yamada said with an unholy abundance of glee. "We're going to be escorting this young lady-," he gestured, but she was standing behind him and they couldn't see any part of her, "back home. Get me?"

'Can I stay home?' Raiku asked instantly, looking up at him imploringly. His face darkened.

"No!"

She strived to fabricate an excuse. 'I… I need to take care of my father!' she lied desperately. 'He's… sick.'

She received three disbelieving looks. "It's gonna take more than illness to finish off  _your_  father, Speedy."

'I have my period?' she threw out as a last resort, cringing.

This time, she received two horrified looks and one smug one. "Really?" Yamada asked, smirking.

She broke into cold sweat. 'Ye-es?' she offered slowly.

"Prove it."

She choked on air, stumbling back a step. 'What!?'

Ryuuu and Daisukenojo transferred their horrified looks to Yamada. He was unmoved. "You heard me, Speedy. Prove it." He folded his arms over his chest, squaring his shoulders and looking down at her with an uncompromising expression.

There was no greater humiliation than being asked to prove your own period. She fidgeted on the spot, shifting her weight from foot to foot. 'I… I can't,' she managed, unable to maintain eye contact. Even if she had had her period, all the blood was rushing to her head now anyway, making proof impossible.

"I knew it!" Yamada crowed. "Ichitaka, you're a woman. Does she look like she's got it?"

A blonde head peered around Yamada's gargantuan frame, hazel eyes studying Raiku critically. 'No. Skinny girl like that may not get it for a few more years.'

Raiku went scarlet.

"Few years? That's normal for a kunoich-,"

'Can we not discuss my bodily functions?' Raiku offered from behind her hand, currently firmly placed over her eyes.

"Well we've gotta talk about  _something_  on the way there, don't we Speedy?"

'Why don't we talk about your wife? Isn't she due soon?' she offered with a wince.

Two vile glares instantly snapped back to her.

Yamada's face was split with a glowing smile, creasing the unpleasant scars around his lips in a deeply unsettling way. "Yeah! Next month, actually!" he said proudly. He turned smartly on his heel, enthused strides carrying him quickly past their mission subject, still talking animatedly about his wife.

His wife was not beautiful.

But he always said she was.

Usually for hours on end, which was the problem.

'Good going,  _pal_ ,' Daisukenojo gritted out, clapping her on the shoulder harder than was strictly necessary.

'Yeah,  _Raiku_ ,' Ryuu growled, falling into place on her other side. Ichitaka sent them a curious look over her shoulder, and Raiku sent her a nervous smile in response. Ichitaka seemed less than reassured at the sight of the three of them. Understandable, really. Raiku's frame was stick thin, her painful lack of weight only emphasised by the dark clothes she wore, her mop of brown spiky hair making her look somewhat, in her opinion, like a spastic broom. Ryuu's handsome face resembled a statue for its stillness and aloof air, his black knee-length shorts and long sleeved brown shirt setting off his yellow eyes well, but unable to hide his rather extreme youth and slight build. Daisukenojo's vibrant red hair only clashed with his white singlet shirt and dark green shorts, arms clad in numerous wristbands and making him look even younger than he was.

They were all shorter than the Sand citizen.

They didn't look like shinobi.

On the other hand, Ichitaka was the most beautiful woman Raiku had ever seen. Her hair was almost white blonde and contrasted with her hazel eyes, framed by long, sooty eyelashes. Raiku stared up at her with a mixture of adoration and embarrassment lingering from their earlier, indirect exchange.

'Hi?' she offered in an embarrassing squeak.

Wordlessly, Ichitaka turned back around.

Raiku slumped, receiving a pat on the back for her troubles. 'We've gotta act like proper genin when we get outta the gates, got it?' Daisukenojo said gruffly, noticing the defeated line of her shoulders. She nodded sadly. 'Got it.'

He nodded and walked a little ahead of her, Ryuu following after almost subconsciously. 'You still sound like Yamada,' she heard him mutter, but couldn't make out Daisukenojo's vehement response. She straightened with some effort as her two teammates split to stand on either side of Ichitaka at a respectable distance, assuming her own defensive position at the rear. The gates of Konoha loomed up over them momentarily as they crossed the bridge onto the tree-lined dirt road, before they experienced the sudden rush of freedom leaving their hometown provided.

To Raiku, it felt somewhat like what she imagined standing naked in public. In every shadow, a Plot loomed threateningly, taunting her with images of immaculately styled hair and beauty that required no maintenance. The ancient trees lining their path served only to punctuate the stark contrast between their path and the earthy Gairano compound, where sunlight was perpetually filtered by the fading smog of Plots and came out as a strange grey colour, rather than the vibrant gold pouring over every inch of the road and Raiku's pale features.

Raiku slipped her hands into her pockets, forcing herself to relax. It wouldn't be so bad out here, she hoped quietly, enjoying the fresh breeze pushing her hair out of her face.

She immediately tensed again, eyes widening in shock at her own stupidity. Her hair! How could she forget her hair!? Hair suddenly losing pigment wasn't something they weren't going to notice!

She looked back at the shrinking figure of Konoha with panic in her eyes. They were walking, but walking quickly enough that in the short time since their departure returning to retrieve that supply was impossible. She forced her face back to face the direction they were travelling in, eyes flicking blindly over uneven road and patchy grass. There was no need to panic. She'd just have to improvise.

Improvise with what? Charcoal!?

She blinked.

Charcoal might do.

Her eyes narrowed shrewdly. Charcoal may be too dark. Mud was too thick. Ink? Ink! Ink was  _perfect_.

Her sly gaze flitted over the three members of their party that were still visible to her. How hard could it be to steal ink?

It couldn't be that difficult, surely.

But they had a long day of travelling ahead of them, so it would have to wait. She'd use the ink if they failed to reach Sand before it was time for her hair to be dyed…

Less than a week.

She lightly touched a fist to her open palm in a gesture of determination. She could do this. She could put up with the sand, and the heat, without unexpectedly revitalising the Sand glass industry or dying of dehydration.

She could do this.

 

 

 

 

 

It was an hour shy of nightfall when she was at last allowed to collapse in a conveniently placed clearing, fenced in on one side by a sheer rock face. Collapse she did, rather spectacularly, slumping to the ground in a tangle of limbs that should have been physically impossible.

Yamada looked up from the kindling he was piling in preparation for sundown, shaking his head at her. "Don't get too comfortable, speedy- you three are going to be working, get me?" he asked.

She twitched in response.

"You're all going to be practicing chakra manipulation," he added as Daisukenojo and Ryuu escorted Ichitaka into sight, seating themselves with considerably more grace than their overheated teammate. Ryuu raised an eyebrow, settling back on his hands.

Yamada jerked his head at the rock face, which recognised a hint when it saw one and released a few stray pebbles to ricochet off particularly sharp edges ominously. "You're all going to be climbing that."

Raiku brightened from under her arm. Rock-climbing she could do.

"With chakra!"

She bit her lip, crossing her eyes with the effort it took to not swear. "Yes," Yamada continued heedlessly, taking some sort of feral joy from their displeasure, as he always did, "you're going to learn how to use chakra in a way that's actually useful!"

Ryuu's eyebrow remained raised, and Raiku could just tell what he was thinking. The jutsu that allowed him to pull the air from someone's lungs was useful. The jutsu that made a copy of himself from wind was useful. Walking up a cliff face held only by the application of chakra did not seem useful, but did seem dangerous.

She bit the skin between thumb and first finger worriedly, unfolding herself into a seated position by what would in a few hours be the fire. Up a cliff? Up a cliff… with chakra? She tried to hold back the look of terror in front of Ichitaka, wishing for nothing more than the beautiful woman's absence. Falling to her death was bad enough, but with her luck she'd fall into an embarrassing pose and be immortalised that way in both Konoha  _and_  Sand.

Ryuu got to his feet, looking at Yamada with a blank expression. 'How do I do this, Yamada?' he asked. If Raiku didn't see the occasional flash of rage, she'd think him a sociopath. He loved the necessary, and almost nothing else.

That and she'd seen him blush in the arms of his mother once. That alone had convinced her he wasn't the sociopath he strived so hard to resemble.

"Concentrate your chakra onto your feet, and walk up."

Their leader seemed to remember something as Ryuu took a step towards the stone. "Most beginners find it easier to run, and maintain it as long as they can, get me? Slower is harder, and this sorta thing comes with practice."

'I get you,' Ryuu said, tilting his head back to drag his eyes up the wall. Daisukenojo watched him like a hawk, and Raiku found herself doing the same. Ryuu's chakra control was by far the best out of the three of them even with Daisukenojo's natural advantages bringing him up to speed, and thus if he could at least get close on the first try then  _surely_ …

Ryuu took several steps back, before sprinting forward and up the perfectly vertical cliff face. Raiku gaped up at him, wide eyes giving away what the mask tried so valiantly to hide. Ryuu made it successfully up roughly ten metres before his feet lost whatever had held them there and sent him plummeting back towards the ground.

Raiku gave an involuntary yelp of concern when he hit the ground, hands instantly coming up to cover her mouth. Yamada smirked knowingly, settling back next to Ichitaka to watch the show. After a moment in which he simply couldn't breathe, Ryuu took a gasping breath and sat up, arm twisting to try and rub his back.

'I … can do that better,' he said after a while, wheezing only slightly. He got to his feet.

"I'd better see you land properly, get me?" Yamada demanded, but his glinting eyes belied the casual playfulness within. "We're shinobi, not rocks."

Raiku risked a glance at him out of the corner of her eye.

"You two, don't make him do all the work," Yamada ordered.

With considerable reluctance, she got to her feet.

"And… go!"

Instinctively she responded to the command, sprinting towards the cliff as quickly as she could, planting an impossibly fast foot onto the stone and launching herself up it, forgetting in her haste to attach any chakra to her feet at all.

Ryuu watched with mild surprise as she made it far higher than he had, shortly before she began to fall with a petrified shriek.

"I said use your chakra, Speedy!" Yamada bellowed as she fell downwards, desperately twisting to try and land on her feet. "Don't think I didn't notice that you're cheating!"

Raiku managed to land on her feet, knees bending to absorb the impact automatically with a quiet crack. She bit her lip and clutched her shin, little white dots appearing in front of her eyes. 'Not… fun,' she managed. Daisukenojo craned his neck to look up at the distant top of the cliff.

He didn't end up saying anything, but chose to run forward without comment.

Yamada settled back again, moving only to shout both advice and reprimand. By the time nightfall actually came about, the path Raiku had taken to the cliff was burnt into the soil and grass forever, blackened footsteps leading up past the scuff marks of the others and her teammates pointedly not asking her why.

It was her cue to tell them on her own, and she recognised that. But being too close to her teammates would inevitably lead to betrayal. The small part of her mind dedicated solely to her efficiency as a shinobi pointed out that being aware of strengths and weaknesses would allow them to better work with her, ruthlessly quashed by the significantly bigger part dedicated solely to being a Gairano.

Attaching chakra to the soles of her shoes was less effective than simply creating a web underneath her foot, but for the moment it was as much as she could manage and it allowed her to stay on the cliff without falling, which was really all she wanted. Ryuu had managed to walk to the top of the cliff and tell them how far they still were from the desert- far- before walking down, while Daisukenojo managed to run up and achieve the same end.

Now they sat around the cheerful if slightly small fire, watching the pot bubbling over it with conspicuously ravenous interest. Ichitaka had watched the afternoon's entertainment with some interest, but evidently found the strange dynamic even more fascinating.

Raiku watched her analyse them with some curiosity. The older woman's eyes lingered on Ryuu for a few seconds longer than they had on her and for an even briefer period on Daisukenojo. The silence was punctuated by the crackling of the fire and the distinct sound of four people fixedly  _not_  talking about something.

Raiku cleared her throat awkwardly.

"So," Yamada said brightly, making three well-conditioned genin flinch. "You mentioned stunted puberty for girls as thin as Raiku?"

Raiku, for the second time that day, choked.

Ichitaka nodded, and if she was taken aback at the topic she didn't give any indication. 'Girls who suffer from being underweight often find themselves developing late- if at all.'

From the beady stare Yamada was giving her, Raiku was going to be given extra stew tonight. She sank her head into her hands, elbows resting on crossed legs. A surprised sound issued from Ichitaka. 'Raiku-chan, you don't need to be embarrassed. Hasn't your mother told you about this sort of thing?' she inquired.

'My mother's dead,' Raiku said with awkward cheer.

Ichitaka looked taken aback. 'I'm sorry to hear that. Was she also a shinobi?'

Raiku looked up, brow wrinkled in confusion. '… No.'

Ichitaka hesitated before she asked her next question. 'Do you mind if I asked how she died?'

Raiku stared at her. 'No.'

There was an awkward silence.

Ryuu sighed, rolling his eyes and better grasping how Raiku's mind worked. 'So how did she die, toaster?'

'Electrical malfunction in the hospital when I was born,' Raiku supplied readily. Yamada's eyes immediately flicked over to her, but he chose to remain silent.

'Why aren't you dead then?' Ryuu asked unabashedly. Ichitaka winced, eyes darting between them. 'That was a very callous question,' Raiku heard her murmur to Yamada, who simply laughed.

'Don't know,' Raiku shrugged carelessly, pulling up some grass as she stared at the ground. 'Dad never really talks about it.'

'It must be painful for him,' Ichitaka supposed.

Raiku snickered faintly. 'No, he's just really busy. He doesn't mind talking about her, but neither of us really feel like it most of the time.'

Ryuu nodded, easily accepting the reason. 'I see.'

'What about you, Daisukenojo?' Raiku asked after a moment's respectful pause, looking over at him. 'What's your family like?'

'I've got six brothers and sisters,' he grumbled. 'What do you think it's like?'

'I have no idea,' she responded instantly and honestly. 'I have no brothers or sisters.'

'…Crowded,' he said gruffly, eyes briefly flicking up to meet hers.

'Are you the oldest?' Raiku asked.

'Yeah,' he answered, allowing a small, proud smile to surface. It immediately vanished when Ryuu opened his mouth.

'You're the shortest, too.'

'Shut the hell up!'

"'Electrical malfunction'?" Yamada echoed when the fierce arguing of the two other genin safely drowned out all background noise. Raiku nodded, her eyes wide and sincere.

'Electricity is a dangerous thing.'

"Yeah," he drawled, eyeing her. "I got that."

'You're all insane,' Ichitaka informed them flatly. Raiku's eyes creased in a friendly fashion.

'We're not insane, we're just… sort of weird,' she said sheepishly. Ichitaka gave her a look she felt was less than enthused.

'Shinobi are supposed to be composed, aren't they?' the blonde asked. 'Dignified and powerful?'

'Well, yeah,' Raiku said hesitantly, scratching the back of her head. 'But we're only learning. And we really can do a lot of things that civilians can't. Like running up walls.'

'Anything else?' Ichitaka deadpanned.

'We're not as emotional as we look, either,' Raiku contrived, wincing as she struggled to think of an example. 'I mean… civilians are really into love, aren't they?'

'Are you about to make a sex joke?' Ichitaka asked suspiciously. Yamada snorted derisively, lifting the lid on the pot and stirring. Clearly she hadn't spent any time talking to Raiku before.

On cue, Raiku flushed with embarrassment. 'No, but it's just … for instance, people in my family are always taught that love is watching somebody die. And from what I've seen, it's not the same for civilians. So we can… look really emotional, but I think that our emotions, or how we see the  _same_  emotions, are actually different to yours.'

She looked up, expression uncertain. 'Am I… making any sense?'

For a long time, Ichitaka just looked at her. 'Yes,' she said eventually. 'Yes, I think you are.' And then she smiled, for the first time since they'd met her, a smile of reassurance that brought life to her beautiful face, making her so lovely something in Raiku twinged in a feeling almost like pain.

Raiku's eyes lit up with joy. 'I'm glad,' she said simply and sweetly.

"Dinner's ready, ladies!" Yamada announced, hiding a smile. "First come, first served."

The two boys were instantly at each other's throats, rolling in the grass and dirt and using every underhanded method they could think of. Raiku smiled ruefully, scratching the back of her head again.

They were still the worst team ever, from the looks of things.


	9. carrion and hairstyles

After four days of walking on water, running up cliffs and standing on the bottom of tree branches, Team Ten reached the border to the land of Wind.

Raiku was already audibly panting in the heat, spiky hair drooping slightly. She felt sweat drying on her forehead as they stopped to rest, not daring to sit down for fear of exposed skin coming into contact with even miniscule grains of sand. Ichitaka was sending her concerned looks, but Yamada's expression was smug.

She cracked her neck as she stretched, resting her hands on her knees wearily. 'Is this… as hot as it gets?' she panted, lifting an arm to wipe the sweat from the sides of her face. Ichitaka winced. Raiku had a sinking feeling that she wouldn't like the other woman's answer.

'No,' Ichitaka said, predictably. 'It's only morning. It gets much hotter as the day goes on… especially as we near the village.'

Raiku bit her lip. Sand-nin and Konoha-nin didn't get along. Konoha and Sand in general didn't get along, either. What were the odds any Sand citizen would be willing to give her information on escaping the heat with the massive Konoha symbol on her forehead?

Also, where was she going to get hair dye?

'Shouldn't you take some clothes off, toaster?' Ryuu asked, chewing on a piece of grass he most definitely should  _not_  have been able to find in this heat. She eyed it resentfully. 'It's not like you don't have any to spare.'

She silently despaired. She knew she couldn't spare a single one, a single inch of fabric. In heat she may concede but in sand it was simply too dangerous. She wasn't used to walking on sand, so if she tripped and her bare arm flung out, or if she smiled and the sun wasn't bright enough to hide the blue behind her teeth, everything would fall apart.

'I… Gairano… Gairano family rule,' she forced out, shoving her protector up to allow her to wipe her forehead with the back of a glove.

Ryuu raised a sceptical eyebrow. 'Why haven't I seen any other Gairano dressed like that?'

'Specific... special rules,' Raiku explained wearily. And she knew, interestingly enough, that he'd buy it. She'd realised a long time ago that the evasiveness of her family came off as, well…

Mystery.

True to form, Ryuu nodded, taking the grass from between his lips and flicking it away. 'We should go,' he said to Yamada. 'She won't make it if she stays out in this for too long.'

Raiku sent him an exhausted smile. 'Thank you for your concern, Ryuu-kun,' she said formally.

'Not concern, toaster- if you collapse, I'll end up carrying you.  _Somehow_  everything you do ends up inconveniencing me more than anyone else,' Ryuu retorted rudely.

Raiku's eyebrow twitched. 'I… I see.'

'No way. She almost burnt my hand off when we had to carry her to the village,' Daisukenojo said, shooting Ryuu a hostile glare.

Raiku brightened. 'Thank you for carrying me Da-,'

'She zapped me with her chakra  _and_  bled all over me,' Ryuu denied flatly, folding his arms across his chest as Raiku visibly deflated in the background. 'I tried to stop the bleeding and she actually fought me. While unconscious, she fought me.'

'She landed on me when we were practising cliff-running!'

'She sent a pebble flying into my eye.'

'She's done that to me heaps of times!'

'Yeah, but you never  _use_  your eyes, so it doesn't matter as much.'

'Say that again, asshole, I dare you!'

'Watch your language!' Yamada instantly roared, surging to his feet and looming over them with the flames of murderous intent burning in his eyes. 'There's a lady present!'

Raiku's shoulders drooped sadly.

'Ladies!  _Ladies_ present,' Yamada corrected hastily, wincing faintly. Two belligerent sets of eyes, one unnatural yellow and the other mud brown glared up at him.

'Do you see more than one lady, Daisukenojo?' Ryuu asked tersely, eyes flicking over to the shorter boy.

'No,' Daisukenojo said flatly.

Raiku made a quiet whimper of defeat.

'Me neither,' Ryuu shrugged. 'We should go, shouldn't we?'

Yamada sent them displeased looks.

'Yamada, I believe that there is a Sand-nin outpost not far from here; we may be able to rest there until nightfall. Travelling by night would make the journey easier on all of us,' Ichitaka volunteered, graciously not looking or gesturing at Raiku.

"Sounds like a good plan, Ichitaka!" Yamada said with strained cheer, a small muscle in his eyelid twitching as he looked away from the two boys. "Come on, team!"

'Yes Captain,' Ryuu drawling, giving a casual salute. Raiku stared at him, aghast.

In the heat he was almost  _cheerful._

Talkative, even.

Or maybe, as she suspected was more likely, he just took amusement from her suffering.

Deep into paranoid musings, it took her a moment to realise they were walking off without her. 'Wait!' she cried. 'Wait for me!' She took off, yelping as even through the soles of her shoes the heat burnt her feet.

A faint cry of 'I hate the desert!' frightened several vultures from their rest and the dark birds lazily made after the small group. High above even those birds, a hawk circled in front of the sun, keeping a lone eye trained on them, looking for stragglers.

A girl in black with thin limbs was at the top of the list.

* * *

'Water,' Raiku rasped pathetically from Ryuu's back, the side of her face pressed between his shoulder blades. 'I … need water.'

'Stop. Talking,' Ryuu gritted out, fiercely trying to ignore her despite her arms thrown over his neck and his hands on the knees hooked over his hips. 'We agreed there would be no. Talking.'

'I'm sorry, Ryuu,' Raiku croaked, sniffing pathetically. 'But I think I'm actually going to die if I don't get some water soon.'

'That is  _talking_.'

'God, just take off some clothes!' Daisukenojo exclaimed, giving her an incredulous look. 'No rule's gonna be worth this sort of grief!'

'Family rules are,' she maintained weakly, managing a feeble cough.

'Always  _me_ ,' Ryuu fumed, eyes burning with repressed ire as he made his scowling way over the sand towards a speck on the horizon Yamada  _swore_  was an outpost, spindly girl clutching his back. 'It is  _always me_.'

Daisukenojo valiantly tried to force the corners of his lips down, and failed spectacularly. 'What- don't like having girls pressed against you Ryuu- _kun_?' he taunted.

Ryuu's head snapped around to fix him with a glare that should have left him dead. ' _Shut up_.'

'I mean, getting sweaty with a girl is something only a real guy-,'

' _I will kill you in ways so horrible your imagination won't let you think of them_.'

'Ryuu,' Raiku pointed out falteringly, trying to shift her legs in his suddenly tight grip. She grimaced. 'Uh… Ryuu, my legs-,'

His head turned around as far as it could, leaving him able to fix a burning yellow eye on her over his shoulder.

'…Are fine,' she finished lamely, shooting him a terrified smile. 'Great, in fact!' She broke into nervous laughter.

His head slowly turned back to the front.

Her nervous laugh trailed off.

She shot Yamada a pleading look.

He ignored her, whistling cheerfully. She narrowed her eyes. 'Your joy is directly inversely proportionate to our pain.'

"What was that, Speedy?"

'When are we going to get there?' she asked instead.

He gave her a puzzled look. "Is Ryuu not going fast enough?"

She felt the muscles in Ryuu's back tense dangerously. His fingers dug into the backs of her knees sharply. 'He's fine!' she squeaked. The fingers loosened only slightly. 'He's going very quickly,' she hastily amended. The pressure changed to bearable levels. 'I'm just sort of … dehydrated?'

'That's because you've been sweating all over-,' Daisukenojo began, cut off quickly by Ryuu's furious hiss.

' _You will die a thousand deaths._ '

"We'll get there soon, don't you worry!" Yamada assured her, eyes glinting with unrestrained glee. The scars around his mouth gave away his mirth, creasing before his lips ever moved.

'You  _could_  just take off something,' Daisukenojo maintained, looking sickeningly refreshed in only a white singlet and his shorts and Konoha sandals. Ryuu was in a similar state of undress, clad in a mesh shirt instead of his usual one. Raiku was…

In fact more covered up than usual. Under her sleeves were layers of protective bandaging, and the dressing on her stomach made it that much worse.

'I… can't,' she sighed in defeat, letting her face fall onto Ryuu's back. She felt the vibrations of his aggravated growl and decided to ignore them.

He wouldn't use one of his wind techniques on her, he liked her!

'Ryuu,' she said slowly after giving that sentiment some actual thought. 'You know you need me alive to do the chuunin exam… right?'

She looked at his back fearfully.

He made a noncommittal sound.

She paled. 'You… do,' she added, cringing.

'We'll see, toaster,' he growled ominously. 'We'll  _see_.'

'What, Ryuu- don't you  _like_  Raiku?'

' _I will rip your tongue out and bury you alive in the sand_.'

Raiku whimpered quietly, leaning as far away from him as she could without disrupting his balance.  _I'm going to die. My own teammate is going to kill me. Daisukenojo will be traumatised and go up to a Drama Level two._

Daisukenojo didn't look very traumatised, just slightly sunburnt and smug. His multitude of freckles seemed to be gathering new recruits on the edges of his face. Ryuu was tanning, not a freckle in sight.

She narrowed her eyes as realisation struck.

 _Ryuu was a Drama Level two or above_.

Only people of a certain Drama Level could go through life looking effortlessly perfect!

Right now his slate grey hair was pushed back from his face in the slight breeze, almost long enough to be called long and pulled into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck.

_Perfect hair._

She'd have to cut it.

_Improbable eyes…_

Well there was no real solution for that. But the  _hair_  she could change.

Hair was a dangerous thing.

She absently reached for a kunai.

He wouldn't use his wind techniques on her- he needed her to do the chuunin exam!

She leant forward and prayed to any merciful god listening.


	10. stars and scars

"Raiku, take the mask off,' Yamada said wearily, sitting with his head in his hands.

Raiku cradled her broken nose protectively, inching away from him on the makeshift stone bench. 'No! You'll hurt me!'

"You're already hurt, you little-"

'No!'

"Gairano, I am giving you until the count of  _three_ ," Yamada growled, rolling his sleeves up with calculated menace. She tried to squeak and ended up gasping in pain as agony shot up her nose into her brain. The cover of the temporary canvas outpost they currently occupied provided cool shade and a protective team of three Sand-nin, medic luckily included and waiting, the other two jounin training (injuring) Daisukenojo outside.

Outside, Ryuu was doing push ups as punishment.

'I hope you burn to death,' Raiku muttered spitefully, glaring out the flap with an eye swollen and discoloured. The medic squatted in front of her, expression deadpan, waiting patiently. Like Raiku his skin was fully covered, but in cool, sand-coloured linen.

'I can't heal your nose through the mask,' he said flatly, looking up at her.

"You wanna have a freakish nose for the rest of your life!?" Yamada demanded.

'She gave ME a freakish haircut!' Ryuu roared, shifting onto his knees and pointing at her furiously, outrage written on his flushed face. 'And what the FUCK was THAT, Gairano!?'

"Don't swear!" Yamada ordered, shooting him a thoroughly rude gesture.

'Oh, I'm sorry- the sudden RUSH OF AIR TO MY HEAD MUST HAVE GOTTEN TO ME!'

'One day you'll  _thank_ me!' Raiku exclaimed, pointing at him in return, trying to glare and ending up squinting lopsidedly.

The medic instantly reached up and twisted.

The pain was short and incredible. Raiku shrieked as the bones and cartilage of her nose slid back into place, trying to jerk back and finding the medic unrelenting in the strength of his grip. The dark red glow of his chakra immediately eased the pain when her eyes started to water, the long, tanned hand hovering gently over her eye.

'See?' the Sand-nin deadpanned. 'Not so bad, is it?'

'Thank… you,' she forced out, blinking furiously in an attempt not to save face, but to save moisture. 'It wasn't… so bad…'

He hissed between his teeth as something pale and sharp danced between the centimetres separating his skin and hers, pulling his hand back to look. 'Your clothes generate a lot of static,' he criticised, frowning at the small red mark on his hand.

'Yes,' she agreed with sudden blankness. 'Yes they do.'

"Flower boy!" Yamada roared, cupping his hands around his mouth after he was satisfied with Raiku's condition. "Time to stop playing with the Sand-nin and get back to the mission, get me? Sun's setting!"

Raiku jerked in surprise, turning her head and leaning forward to stare out of the flaps of the tent.

She blinked, once.

The setting sun sank into the shimmering air flowing from the sand dunes, painting the sky in vivid shades of red, orange and the beginnings of blue. Faint clouds created shadows in the skies and onto the dunes below, and as the light began to shift and move the sand looked like water, catching the light and capturing shadows in nets of glistening grains.

The Gairano segment of her mind whistled sharply, snapping its non-corporeal fingers. That was just about enough romanticism, thank you. Cue sarcastic or dry comment:

'I guess this is as close as I can be to the ocean, huh?' she asked Yamada, appropriately dryly, not tearing her eyes from the scene. He shot her an odd look.

"About as far as you can get, actually."

Her lips twitched distantly, unseen. 'Not what I meant.'

Daisukenojo's abrupt reappearance cast a dark shadow over her face, almost completely obscuring the view. He was out of breath, rubbing sand out of his eyes. 'We good to go, Yamada?' he asked, giving his head a brisk shake and sending sand flying everywhere.

"That depends," Yamada said, slowly leaning back in his chair to squint past him. "Has our little trouble maker learnt his lesson!?" he shouted, raising his voice to epic levels.

There was no response.

"I  _said -"_

'Sure,' Ryuu's voice said wearily, glower still audible in his tone. 'Why not?'

"Good! Ichitaka, we're ready to go when you are!" he called. A low sound of assent was his answer. He stood, and Raiku winced at the series of cracks as he stretched. "We need to reach Sand by dawn, or speedy's not gonna make it," she made out as he murmured to the Sand-nin, eyes flicking to her to explain the nickname. She tuned out, standing with purposefully loud movements and sauntering out with forced cheer.

Ryuu glared up at her from the sand, sweat beading his brow and practically dripping off him as he took a swig from his water canteen, ugly ropes of sunburn stretching around his torso where his shirt had ridden up or simply failed to protect him. His bare feet were cracked slightly, but as she neared him to apologise, she noticed something that made her eyes crease happily, glad for her teammate.

Around him, the air was cold.

'I'm glad for you, Ryuu!' she smiled, giving him a thumbs up and cheesy eye-crease. 'You mastered that jutsu you were working on!'

Daisukenojo snorted, turning to look at them over his shoulder. 'Bastard didn't feel the need to share,  _of_   _course_.'

Ryuu's yellow eyes narrowed into slits.

'I'm… sorry… about your hair,' she said after the silence stretched on to the point of unbearable tension for her. She pointedly did  _not_  look at his now very short hair, as spiky as hers but for the bangs, which hung slightly lower. 'It… I wasn't… I wasn't thinking, and I'm really sorry.' She bowed as low as she could, which was impressive when a shinobi did it. 'Please forgive me!'

Those yellow eyes sparked maliciously. 'Oh… I'll forgive you…' Ryuu said slowly, half-laughing, half-growling, as though he couldn't believe what he was saying. 'I'll forgive you on  _one condition._ '

Raiku tilted her head up without straightening. 'What's the condition?'

She wants to be forgiven, wants it badly, but she can't afford to bond and she can't afford to be careless.

'Take off your mask,' he smiled unpleasantly, showing far too many teeth.

The sun began to fade to purple and deep, rich blues. A star winked to life as they stood there in the heavy silence and the approaching cool, grains of sand stirring in the unnatural air around the seated boy.

'Ryuu, I'm not allowed,' she sighed, dropping her head and assuming an almost comically sheepish expression. 'It's against the family rules.'

'And  _assault_  is against the Konoha  _laws_. Take the mask off, or consider what your stay in this team will be like with me mad at you.'

She paused.

Trading teams was a bad idea.

'Alright,' she said slowly, looking up again. 'I'll take my mask off. Do you forgive me?'

Ryuu tilted his head, looking at her suspiciously. The pause they fell into was almost stifling. 'Sure,' he said eventually.

She beamed at him, eyes forming those ridiculous crescent shapes of happiness. 'Thank you, Ryuu!' she said cheerfully, straightening and dusting sand from her shorts. 'We should be going now.'

Daisukenojo sputtered indignantly. 'You said you'd take your mask off!' he accused.

'Yes!' she chirped, turning and sending him that curiously happy expression. 'But I never said I'd do it now!'

The pause wasn't so heavy this time.

To her profound relief, Ryuu chuckled slightly. His voice was hoarse and the sound threatening, but he chuckled nonetheless. He stood, cracking the bones in his neck in a way he knew irritated her. He looked right at her, sardonic smirk on his face.

'I can respect that sort of underhanded behaviour,' he said dryly. 'If it's rare.'

She turned back around, shooting him a megawatt smile in all senses of the word. 'No problem!'

'He actually smiled! Maybe he's  _not_  an Uchiha clone!' Daisukenojo gasped with mock surprise.

'I don't refuse to smile because I'm an overly emotional moron- I don't smile because I believe baring teeth is an act of aggression,' Ryuu smiled unpleasantly.

Raiku looked at his perfectly white teeth, and shuddered. She personally never wanted to see them again.

'There are exceptions,' he allowed, turning his back to them.

'Remind me never to piss  _him_  off,' Daisukenojo muttered to her, taking a few casual steps to stand at her side.

'You wouldn't listen even if I did, Daisuke,' she sighed.

"Damn right," Yamada said sagely, nodding and putting a heavy hand on each other their shoulders. "Now quit dawdling, ladies, because we have a  _real_  lady to escort home!"

Raiku deflated again, sagging.

"Oh I'm not even going to  _bother_ , Speedy, you can just  _deal with it_."

Yamada pushed past, settling into a steady pace that took him at decent speed over the dunes. Daisukenojo followed, again drawing level with Ryuu before the two split off, leaving Ichitaka to settle in the middle and Raiku to guard the back, completing the diamond formation.

Raiku looked up at Ichitaka passed her, into the midnight blue sky. A curious look stole over her features, as she was once again confronted with the feeling spurred by Ichitaka's smile, confronted with a beauty too perfect, a beauty too unspeakable and untouchable. The stars numbered in millions, caught together by ethereal celestial trials and winking at her faintly from their sea of darkness, hanging suspended over the flat and limitless sands she stood on.

She felt so small.

It was a good feeling, for any Gairano, constantly twisted into webs of narrative and searching desperately for a hole to escape through.

'Oi toaster- hurry it up!' Daisukenojo shouted back to her, grounding her instantly. She darted across the rapidly cooling sands, feet padding silently into the soft surface and propelling her easily. She didn't know what she'd been worrying about: sand was easy to move in.

Footprints made of glass trailed after her and shone with light stolen from stars, and in the dark above them, a hawk followed.

 

 

 

 

 

'Victory!' she crowed- croaked, really- as she stood inside the deep chasm in the earthen barricade surrounding Sand. 'Victory!'

'We made it.  _Yay_ ,' Ryuu snorted, rolling his eyes and absently chewing on a piece of grass.

'Where did you get that…?' she asked, staring at him. He quirked a brow.

'What was that?'

'Commentary on poorly constructed narrative function, it doesn't matter,' she dismissed hastily, raising her hands in front of her. 'But we got to Sand!'

'Two hours  _after_  dawn,' Daisukenojo pointed out, successfully popping her bubble. 'We were too slow.'

A Sand-nin with a thoroughly sour expression stood with his arms crossed at the end of the enormously thick and tall barricade gap, arms crossed and feet set firmly apart. His eyes were curiously darkly rimmed, a swathe of white fabric hanging to obscure half of his face from his forehead protector.

'Hello! We brought Ichitaka!' Raiku greeted, waving enthusiastically. Other than a slight twitch of his eye, he gave no response until Yamada walked up to and towered over him, expression curiously blank.

'Konoha Team Yamada reporting the successful completion of the escort mission assigned by Ichitaka.'

For some reason, this statement did not in fact warrant full quotation marks.

Raiku's eyes creased with worry. Behind her back, she could  _feel_  the other two exchanging looks. She tried to look up at the sky, craning her neck to do so, but the walls were simply too high.

_The walls were crawling with Plot._

She gaped in horror, cringing back. A single Plot! Wait, a single Plot!? That was ridiculous! There was no such  _thing_  as a Plot this big!

Unless it was Uzumaki Naruto, but his name was actually forbidden in her family, as saying it would prompt spontaneous combustion or dramatic pregnancy. Naruto was, for this reason, probably the cause of the population boom as well as the 'anonymous shinobi-to-villain' fodder main supplier.

Verily, for the Gairano family truly did know trouble when they saw it.

She gagged, reflexively, earning herself several odd looks. A small part of the Plot broke off and slithered towards her, faithfully dogging her steps as she discreetly tried to inch away.

Yamada turned, inclining his head to Ichitaka. 'Ichitaka, my team and I are glad to have served you well,' he said formally, for some reason still failing to recover his illustrious punctuation.

The white-blonde woman bowed. 'I honour you and your team, Yamada.'

She half turned, inclining her head to the three genin watching her. The corners of her lips twitched into a ghost of that exquisite smile, before she turned on her heel and vanished into the light beyond the chasm.

Raiku tried to surreptitiously lean away from a wall, which waved at her.

The Sand-nin turned abruptly, moving away from them stiffly.

"Well, ladies, we've got until tomorrow night to recover, then we set off, get me!?" Yamada boomed cheerfully, turning to them with that smile that frightened Raiku still.

She nodded uneasily, casting an eye over the walls. She was tired- exhausted, in fact. But the steady surges of electricity that her body provided her from its desperation kept her moving and alert. It was a strange feeling, almost like heaviness under her sternum, one that she physically was unable to succumb to as long as this strange feeling, almost like elation burned along her veins. But she was tired, and she recognised the danger signs. Mostly because she had a senbon still sticking to her magnetised forehead protector, but that wasn't the important thing here.

"Welcome to Sand, team," Yamada grinned, surrounded by the brilliant nimbus of light that was the exit.

He stepped downwards, steadily vanishing from their sight. Raiku and the others paused, before they ran. She easily led the way, skidding to a halt as she almost tripped over the stairs descending into Sand.

She stared, wide eyed.

Sand lay inside a giant earthen bowl, and sprawled for miles inside it. The city itself was far below the level of the dunes outside and made of buildings the same colour as the desert outside rather than steel and glass. Wood was scarce, obviously a rare commodity in such a distant and isolated place. The earthen walls cradled the city and the sky above it, and once more she was struck by the  _space_.

That and the Plot.

It literally surrounded the city.

The piece that had detached itself clung helplessly to her foot, unable to assimilate with her as the inaudible crackling of her skin kept it at bay. She jerked her foot, but it stubbornly refused to leave. 'Hell yes,' Daisukenojo smirked, putting his hands on his hips. 'Traveling to different hidden towns? This is totally what I signed up for.'

'And here I was thinking that it was for the excitement and honour of protecting your country and loved ones,' Ryuu drawled.

'Nope,' Daisukenojo said without a hint of embarrassment. 'This is totally it, right here.'

Raiku turned her head and looked at him for a moment, then turned back to face the city. She was, in truth, paralysed with indecision. Clearly this was a plot far bigger than what she was accustomed to, spanning multiple lives. It must have been anchored here by some primary component, now unable to leave. Webs of narrative hung over the city like some foul web, the thickest leading directly into the most fortified building- probably the office of the Kazekage.

She wasn't qualified to deal with this.


	11. sand and floodwater

It was without fail, hesitation or conscious thought that Raiku got herself into trouble in Sand. It was probably Yamada's fault.

"No vacancies again, team," he said apologetically, stooping to get through the doorway into a motel. "So they're all dead-set on ignoring everyone from Konoha, in other words."

Raiku sagged in disappointment. She was… so tired.

"So team, we're going to split up. Find yourself a hotel and try and get a place there," he ordered, setting his hands on his hips. "This is your new mission, get me? Once you've found a place that'll accept all four of us, send up the signal."

They all looked at Raiku.

'Why am I the signal, again?' she asked dubiously, raising an eyebrow.

'Because you explode sometimes,' Daisukenojo said, mockingly echoing her words in hospital.

'Right, right…'

"So when you find a place, book it and get speedy to send one up. Team Ten, go!"

Reluctantly, the three genin parted ways. Raiku trudged down the street made of packed sand, ignoring pointedly the vendors who waved at her and called out prices beguilingly. No hair dye, no purchase. But the colourful fabric and delicately elegant glass that was so rare in Konoha did catch her eye occasionally, at which point she forced her attention to the piece of Plot trailing after her woefully. It occasionally made sounds it probably thought were pleading, snatches of voices of the people it ensnared. She made sure to tread very hard when it did so.

She made her way to a place that looked desperate enough to be willing to accept Konoha-nin, made of clay and sand, with holes instead of glass windows. The surly and largely unwashed man at the counter had taken one look at her forehead protector and claimed no vacancies, straight-faced despite the clear row of keys behind him. She'd wheedled half-heartedly, but found herself unable to maintain her cheerful persona in the heat.

Now she sat on a swing and leant her forehead against the chains, feet absently trailing on the ground. There had been children playing when she'd arrived, but when she'd seized the opportunity to steal the swing to sit on, they'd been pulled away by their parents. The act was curiously choreographed, and she assumed it was because there were frequently causes to pull away their children in Sand. From what she'd seen, it was a harsh place with tough people that tried their best to make it seem better than it was.

She smiled to herself faintly, closing her eyes. That description sounded familiar. But because Raiku was a magnet for trouble as a sore thumb in a world of fingers, even this restfulness simply couldn't be allowed to survive.

The texture of the air changed.

She pressed herself closer to the chain reflexively, refusing to budge before the request was ever made.

'Move.'

The Plot at her feet surged upwards, shoving her backwards by throwing itself into her solar plexus. She grasped the chain tightly and managed to catch herself with her head only inches above the ground, legs splayed awkwardly to try and keep precarious balance. She tried to look at the voice and was blocked by Plot, trying to actually hide in her clothes. She pulled herself slowly upright, wobbling more than was dignified for a Konoha-nin. Her eyes slowly settled on green ones.

Green ones without pupils.

'Hey,' she said slowly, eyes creasing into a nervous smile. 'I'm Gairano Raiku. What's your name?' She winced at how patronising she sounded. A thick web of Plot shimmered and vanished in every breath the other boy took, visible even in the arms crossed across his chest. His hair was an improbable shade of red, tousled and kept short. His eyes were rimmed in black no cosmetic could emulate, a symbol for love marked out on his forehead in ink under his skin. On his back was a gourd with an almost comically large stopper in the end, his clothes the light, practical wear of a shinobi in this sort of environment.

The hostile green eyes didn't shift, the boy obviously still waiting for her to obey his order.

He smelt like blood.

The sand under her feet shifted in a way compelled by no wind, and she edged forward on the swing, holding out a gloved hand. 'Nice to meet you,' she said cheerfully, tilting her head in a way she felt was friendly. 'I'm here on a mission from Konoha. You're a shinobi too, right?'

It was clear that she was in danger- she was awkward, not stupid. Through sheer force of will she kept her eyes from checking for a teammate or some sort of- any sort of- help, praying quietly to the force of Obscurity that she would be too troublesome to kill, maim or in any way injure.

'I'm, uh, probably annoying you, right?' she ventured, sliding slowly off the swing and onto her feet, dropping her outstretched hand and raising the other to scratch the back of her head. 'So… I'll…' she trailed off, desperately searching for some sort of body language to read, some sort of physical or visual cue to take. He remained perfectly still, eyes narrowed in unconcealed hostility. 'I'll just… go…'

The silence stretched on agonisingly.

'I should probably find my teammates,' she continued on, starting to babble in nervousness. 'We're having a hard time finding a hotel that'll accept Konoha-nin, with the way things are between our villages, and I should go back and tell them I couldn't find anything…'

She edged around him, giving him a wide berth and never turning her back to him in the guise of courtesy. The Plot! It was  _huge_.

She resolved to end this on a good note, because she'd be  _damned_  if any Plot would keep her from being polite, and smiled at him brilliantly, giving him a two-fingered salute and valiantly crushing her trepidation down. 'It was nice to meet you! I hope to see you again, mystery-nin!'

That last bit was a bit much, she decided, and promptly ran.

He remained where he stood when she'd left him, perfectly still and immovable, but for the eyes sliding back to the swing.

'Hey toaster! Signal for me!' Daisukenojo called as he caught sight of her trying to turn a corner and accelerate at the same time, very nearly colliding with two Sand-nin. The two cast her looks of disgust shortly before her hand shot into the air, electricity escaping from the gap between her sleeve and glove to explode violently in the air above the town. At that point they simply decided to save themselves some trouble and move on.

Daisukenojo snorted. 'It's not that great,' he muttered, slouching over to her. 'What were you running from, anyway? Did a dog look at you?'

'Sand-nin,' Raiku managed, waving that same hand in a direction just to his left. He, admirably, didn't flinch. 'Scary.' She pulled a face and lowered her eyebrows pensively to try and imitate the dark look, succeeding in looking disgruntled.

Daisukenojo stared at her. 'Are you on drugs or something, toaster?'

'No! But… it was…' She broke off, accepting with a sigh that she would always be the wimp of the group. It was inevitable. She was fairly sure Ryuu wasn't capable of fear, and Daisukenojo's constant desire to outdo the taller boy meant if he was ever afraid than he didn't show it. Since she only cared about getting along well enough to work efficiently as a team, she didn't bother to hide her fear in trivial situations.

"Have you been running again, speedy?" Yamada asked suspiciously materialising at her side with a silence no man of his size should have been able to accomplish. She managed not to scream. "Because I told you not to attract attention, remember?"

'I wasn't  _not_  running,' she said evasively.

'Who found the place?' Ryuu asked from two inches behind her backbone. She twitched.

'Is it "sneak up on Raiku" day?' she asked, twisting to look at him awkwardly with a sceptical expression.

'Yes.'

'I found it,' Daisukenojo announced, gloating. 'Place just over there. They want to be paid first thing in the morning and they've got two rooms available for us. Konoha-nin and all.'

'Why is it "sneak up on Raiku" day?' she persisted, ignoring the redhead.

'Because you're jumpy and it's funny.'

'I don't think it's very funny,' she criticised.

'I never said it was funny for you.'

'Oh, goodie-  _I'm going to kill you._ '

'How about you try, toaster-head?'

"How much?" Yamada said wearily, trying his best to ignore the two fighting genin. Daisukenojo shrugged.

'I figured that was your thing to take care of.'

Yamada's attention was instantly caught when Ryuu snarled in pain, taking several defensive steps back and holding his left hand protectively. Raiku's bright eyes were narrowed vengefully, burning in challenge. 'How about you try that again, Ryuu? Wanna see if it happens again!?'

'Who the hell uses their own chakra to fend off something that weak!?' he shot back, bringing his scorched fingers to his mouth to try and lessen the sting.

'I told you  _not to touch me_ -,'

"Break it up or I will break  _you_ , you two!" Yamada bellowed, stepping between them. "We know that I am not a violent man, but if you don't get your asses over to the hotel  _right now_  I will start cracking skulls!"

Raiku shot Ryuu a vile glare, hackles raised. The yellow-eyed boy scowled at her, reluctantly turning away towards Daisukenojo, who knew a hint when he saw one and moved to lead the way to the hotel.

"And you, Speedy, I'm going to have a long talk with later, get me?" Yamada growled, grabbing her by the back of her shirt. Her hair brushed his knuckles as he lifted her, singeing his gloves and burning the hair on the back of his unprotected fingers. "You do  _not_  use that on your teammates," he hissed.

'I didn't!' she shot back, equally enraged. 'He tried to flick me in the face and it showed up on its own! Like it always does! And I couldn't stop it, like I always can't!'

"Try. Harder,' he ordered in low, dangerous tones. Raiku stiffened, a surge of resentment hitting her. Did he honestly believe that this was a matter of choice? Did he honestly believe that this was something she was just  _allowing_  to happen?

Yamada, on the other hand, instantly recognised his mistake. The poorly concealed resentment struggling free in her eyes made it clear for him. His job was to be the adult in this relationship, and to set an example, but he'd berated her for something she couldn't stop and probably hated. That sort of thing encouraged self-loathing if they took it to heart, and the more destructive concealed loathing of the institutions that the one berating them represented if they didn't.

"Gairano," he said quietly. "Gairano, look at me."

She refused, stubbornly, averting her gaze.

"Gairano, that's an order," he persisted, shaking her lightly.

'Cram it,' she said bluntly. In her peripherals it looked like Yamada was fighting to stop his jaw from dropping into a scandalised expression. Nastily, she wondered if anyone had told him to do anything since he'd had that fortieth growth spurt.

"Gairano," he said again. "I'm sorry."

'I don't  _care_.'

She could tell he was surprised. Raiku wasn't supposed to be the stubborn one, she was the cheerful wimp!

Call it an exposed nerve.

"Gairano, I'll help you, but I got angry and I'm sorry. Get me?"

And something completely unconnected and irresistible forced her jaw open and formed the words of forgiveness that she wasn't ready to provide. Her eyes widened in surprise.

"Alright. We'll think of some ways to help you out, get me?" he asked with gruff kindness, setting her on the ground. "We'll sort you out."

She nodded, trying desperately to shake her head. She didn't want to learn. She didn't want to risk it for something as inconsequential as touch, and the Plot at her feet was far too happy with this news. She didn't  _want_  to be powerful and she didn't  _want_  to be accessible. The electric barrier forced her to keep others at bay, and as long as it existed there couldn't be a Love Interest.

The Gairano family had Views on love.

"See you inside," he said, scratching the side of his nose in what she'd realised was a nervous gesture. As he walked away the reverie was broken, leaving her in full control of her functions.

She stared in fear at nothing at all.

She'd never had control taken away from her before.

 

 

 

 

 

They'd left Sand early.

The desert was obviously not a place to go for wet weather, but once year there was a period in which flash storms became far more common, bringing torrential flooding. They couldn't afford to be caught in the hostile hidden town for a month, and their trip had coincided with that period in in a way most unfortunate.

When they reached the barricade, the sky was so dark with clouds it was almost black, thunder rumbling with the fierce illumination of lightning shining through the thinner patches in warning. It was starting to rain very lightly, and Raiku's mask was exchanged for a full one, her feet clad in bandages in addition to every other piece of clothing she sported, blood singing at every boom of thunder.

She wanted to run.

Wind stirred layers of sand and sent them racing over the heavier dunes, and once again she was reminded of water as she stood inside the entrance through the barricade into Sand. The Sand-nin that had greeted them was standing and looking up at the sky with those curiously dark-rimmed eyes. 'If you travel in this, you'll die,' he said bluntly.

"I think we'll be alright," Yamada said firmly, face serious.

The jounin cast him a derisive look. 'Lightning strikes what's tallest. You'll be in a desert without vegetation or shelter. You'll be burnt to death within minutes once the storm begins. The air becomes humid enough to drown in, which isn't helped by the rain, and the wind can strip the flesh from your bones. The sand doesn't absorb the water effectively and you'll find yourself first wading, then swimming. If you travel in this, you'll die,' he repeated.

"We'll be alright," Yamada repeated back to him, dark brown eyes hard and unflinching.

'You're idiots,' the Sand-nin said flatly. 'Konoha-nin… you all think you're invincible.'

'I can take care of the lightning,' Raiku murmured very, very quietly.

"I know, Speedy," Yamada assured her.

'I can take care of the wind, if we move slowly enough,' Ryuu announced firmly.

Daisukenojo realised he was, in all senses of the word, the short straw and scowled darkly.

"We'll be alright," Yamada said yet again, looking down at the Sand-nin in challenge. He seemed unimpressed.

'Your team is comprised of genin. If you survive to see me again, I'll eat my own forehead protector,' he muttered, turning and stalking stiffly away.

"Speedy, do what you need to do," Yamada said, turning to them and folding his arms over his chest. "Sullen, you think you can maintain chakra use for that long?"

'Yes,' he said firmly.

Yamada eyed him warily. "Can you draw any from shorty?"

'I can give him as much chakra as he damn well needs,' Daisukenojo scowled up at him fiercely, freckled face stubborn. 'You know that.'

"Well, a Hatori technique's gotta be good for something," Yamada joked. Daisukenojo rolled his eyes, which brought them into Raiku's general vicinity. He gawked. 'What the hell are you doing!?' he demanded.

Raiku paused in the middle of peeling off her gloves and sleeves. 'What?' she asked self-consciously.

'You said you were taking care of the lightning, not stripping!' he exclaimed, trying to find a hint of facial expression under that stupid full mask.

'They're directly related!' she shot back defensively.

'How the hell are they? You expecting the lightning to get embarrassed and give you some privacy!?'

'Why don't you ask Ryuu what  _his_  plan entails, huh!?'

'Because his doesn't make him half naked!'

'I'm still wearing more clothes than you!' she said disbelievingly. It was true- she wore the sleeveless black shirt and dark grey shorts, the coverings on her shins and feet abandoned and leaving only bandages. The full mask vanished into her pack.

'…You look like a goddamned ANBU!'

'Don't change the subject!'

'You  _look_  naked!'

'I'm not!'

'But you look that way because you're always fully covered up! Put a goddamn jacket on!' Realisation struck. 'You'll  _freeze_!' he said triumphantly.

'I'm taking care of that too,' Ryuu muttered, rolling up his sleeves and pinning them up with a senbon. His gold eyes were distant, lips moving slightly as he recited something to himself.

'I hate you,' Daisukenojo said to him bluntly. 'You  _want_  her out there like that!?'

'She's taking the mask off. Yes,' he responded instantly. Daisukenojo's head whipped around so quickly it cracked. Raiku's bare fingers- long, perfectly unmarked fingers, some part of his brain pointed out smugly- were settled on the dark latex edges of her mask.

Raiku fidgeted uncomfortably under three sources of intense scrutiny. 'You're making me feel really awkward.'

'Do it, toaster,' Ryuu ordered. 'It was part of our agreement.' Bound by narrative constraints the wind blew his hair in front of his face, contrasting with his perfectly still form to make him unearthly in his magnetism.

'You know you're ordering me to take more clothes off? Daisuke, defend me!'

He shook his head silently, and she noted with a sinking feeling the strangely charged (she took no responsibility) atmosphere. Daisukenojo even looked better in the storm, the forces of causality demanding that in the rain, everything really  _was_  better looking. His cute face seemed older than its years, clothes stirring in the wind.

Yamada's sombre, scarred face looked appropriately dramatic and stern. He seemed the only constant fixture in the impending storm.

Raiku resolved to never go outside again. She yanked down the mask and let it stay around her neck, lifting her impossibly bright eyes to stare at them defiantly. 'Forget my face,' she ordered when it became apparent they weren't intending to. 'I'm good to go, Yamada.'

He nodded. "Sullen?"

Ryuu cracked his knuckles, not moving his eyes from Raiku's face. 'I'm ready, Yamada.'

"Shorty?"

Daisukenojo tore his gloves off, settling next to Ryuu. 'I'm good.'

"If it gets too much, you'll need to carry him, walk on water and feed him chakra at the same time, get me?" Yamada cautioned, eyes darting between the two. "You need to be alright with this now."

'I can do it!' Daisukenojo growled.

"Team Ten, move out," he said in response, squaring his massive shoulders.

He waited for Raiku to pass him. She trod lightly over the sand, bare arms covered with goosebumps in reaction to the light breeze. The temperature dropped and eerie shadows darted over the sand as the sand itself shifted, the lightning as yet still contained above casting horrible and beautiful silhouettes onto the earth.

There was a curious tension, a curious weight as the air hung heavy with what was about to strike. Yamada fell into place at the back behind the two boys, already knitting together a web of chakra that would cover his feet indefinitely. He had performed the same function for Raiku, well aware of her impending distraction- sand covered in water would be disastrous.

Daisukenojo was preoccupied doing the same for he and his temporary partner, brow wrinkled with concentration. A Hatori's skill lay in their incredible proficiency at the transfer and manifestation of chakra, while Ryuu's lay entirely in his manipulation of air, a skill he knew the older boy hadn't learnt from his family.

Raiku was completely carefree, in direct contrast. At last, she could be useful! She could expose her abilities without having a dramatic storyline concerned totally with them and without self-sacrifice! Unfortunately this opened up a lot of possibilities for Ryuu's strange wind techniques and their origins, but that was alright: he'd just have to get a girlfriend. Girlfriends were the  _ultimate_  defence against Plots, unless they were powerful or excessively cheerful.

And it was common knowledge Ryuu was allergic to cheerful people.

This would, quite literally, be a walk in the park for her. Lightning adored her, coveted her so fiercely that each time there was a storm she had to be removed from the compound- Gairanos had enough expenses to cover without having to repair their own facilities, as well as numerous paternity suits to deal with when a family member had said the name of  _he-who-must-not-be-named_.

Whenever Naruto was to be spoken of, they simply said "duty two". The Gairano family knew trouble when they had to pay for it.

But the point was that her teammates would be perfectly safe as long as she remained decently exposed to the elements.

The wind began to cut instead of caress, and Yamada gave a sharp whistle. Instantly the sand around their slow moving feet stilled, the currents of wind around them in abrupt and unwilling rest. Ryuu's left hand, still burnt, was held in front of him in a curious one-handed seal, the other gripping Daisukenojo's upper arm tightly to stop him from tripping as he walked with his eyes closed in concentration. The jutsu required very little of his chakra that she could sense, but the knowledge of wind pressures and currents required was expansive, the concentration levels necessary truly formidable.

Moisture beaded on her forehead as the rain increased ever so slightly, little more than mist in the air at its current level.

Lightning struck for the first time.

It greedily split the air, and Daisukenojo gave a hoarse cry as it slammed into Raiku's diminutive figure head on, electric fingers grasping and seizing her clothes as it sought to bury itself under her skin. The wind instantly began to pull at them as Ryuu responded to thunder and opened his eyes, losing control of the technique in concern.

Yamada attached his chakra to his feet and continued on.

The lightning lasted less than two seconds, two seconds longer than lightning usually deigned to grace the earth. When it vanished Raiku was left with a brilliant, iridescent glow of blinding white, still continuing casually on.

The boys stared at her with varying levels of horror and shock, before Ryuu harshly yanked on Daisukenojo's arm and folded his hand into that curious seal. 'Wind seal technique,' he said quietly, closing his eyes again.

The wind abated.

The rain started.

Within an hour they were walking on a violently disturbed ocean that had once been a desert, the only light that of the lightning surging to meet its earthly counterpart, the wind formerly sealed around them now whirling and deflecting as much of the torrential rain as it could. Raiku remained outside the barrier, sparking and surging with power like some humanised storm, unflinching as the wind stung her face and the water blinded her, slowing her steps and weighing her down. There was no cold of winter or snow that could compare to this. It seized her bones and constricted her heart, alleviated only by the heavenly electricity that sought so desperately to encompass and consume her. Its greed was matched only by that distant, guilty part of her that refused to be a Gairano in favour of being a shinobi, that part that had wanted to train and devour.

They made good progress.

And when night fell and the storm continued to rage and demand, the electric instrument of a god's wrath flashed violently and brightly enough to show a dark shape in the distance. Led by a glowing figure and protected by a boy as much wind as flesh, they struggled on towards the end of the desert, and the end of Wind Country.


	12. coordination

They sat in what passed for silence in the howling wind and freezing cold. Raiku's glow refused to fade, built inside the heart of a storm. She felt…

Happy.

The glow wasn't trying to get out because the power wanted to stay inside. Because it didn't come from her it didn't want to burn or devour, because it came  _to_  her she was all it wanted to be.

Her blood sang.

"Speedy, Sullen, Shorty- you all did Konoha proud," Yamada said, breaking their equivalent to silence. Ryuu leaned on Daisukenojo's back, yellow eyes glazed with exhaustion and fever. His left hand, the one with which he helped to keep them safe, shook as it lay next to him on the wet ground, and the impact of foreign chakra made his skin crawl and his stomach clench. Even a Hatori can only do so much. Daisukenojo's face was flushed with exertion, and his hands shook as he raised his canteen to his lips, wiping his mouth roughly.

'I know how Ryuu does what he does,' he said eventually, avoiding Raiku's gaze. Ryuu gave a soft snort at this, regaining some of his usual derision as the wind tried to reconcile with him, pushing lightly at his hair. 'And I know Yamada's just the toughest guy around. But you've been doing some pretty crazy shit recently, Raiku. You're gonna tell us why.' He passed the canteen back to Ryuu, who had finished his own within the first hour of the storm.

Raiku tilted her head. She opened her mouth to speak, and Daisukenojo watched the threads of electricity span the inside, dancing between her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

'Gairanos don't have bloodline limits,' he said quietly, and she knew he was trying to stop her from lying.

She closed it again, and looked at him for a moment.

'I explode sometimes,' she said simply, lips twitching upwards into a beseeching smile.

After a moment, more because the tension was broken than because what she said was funny, Ryuu began to laugh. Daisukenojo joined in, shoulders wracked with harsh laughing, half-coughing from exhaustion. Yamada chuckled to himself while Raiku just smiled sheepishly, hanging her head, complete with its shock of snow-white – lightning white- hair.

'That explains why I caught you with ink in your hair,' Ryuu managed between breaths, the force of his laughter hurting his weakened form.

'Never mention that again,' she pleaded good-naturedly.

'I'm telling  _everyone_ ,' he said, relishing the words, shooting her a wicked, if exhausted grin over Daisukenojo's shoulder.

'I'll tell everyone Daisuke had to carry you!' she threatened, pointing a lightning-clad finger at him.

'And I'll tell them it was because I was holding off a hurricane, how about that?' he countered, head falling back onto Daisukenojo's shoulder wearily. 'But seriously,' he added in afterthought. 'Tell anyone about it and I'll murder you.'

Raiku grinned at him mischievously.

Yamada looked at the electricity suspended above them as they camped just inside Fire Country, acting as both illumination and call for help. "Yeah," he said proudly. "I've still got the best team."

'I didn't know you were trading teams,' Ryuu said blandly.

Raiku giggled, biting her fist to try and keep it in as Yamada shot Ryuu a dirty look. "You're lucky you're so good with hot air, get me?"

'Ryuu made a joke!' Daisukenojo grinned, craning his neck to look over his shoulder. 'Reckon the world's ending?'

'It'll start with you if you keep moving,' Ryuu cautioned, lips twitching upwards despite his valiant effort to stop them.

'How long do you think it'll take Konoha to send a relief team?' Raiku asked Yamada, smiling brightly.

"They should get here tomorrow," he said, casting another look at the beacon above him. "Speedy… how are you making that?" he asked, frowning slightly.

She shrugged.

'That's the spirit,' Ryuu drawled.

'See, whenever someone's suffering, you get really talkative,' she pointed out, giving him an odd look. ' _Even_   _when it's you_. You're… the miniature form of Ibiki.'

'Don't say that,' Daisukenojo groaned. 'Last thing we need is for him to get ideas, toaster!'

'I still don't think I deserve that nickname,' she said, rolling her eyes.

'I don't know how you got it, and I don't care. It works.'

"Get some sleep, team," Yamada interrupted shaking his head in exasperation. "You all need it. Except you, Speedy."

'Do you have any idea how often you add that to your sentences? I am the exception to every rule.'

"You're running home."

Raiku stared at him. Daisukenojo broke into loud guffaws, wiping tears from his eyes roughly. He continued even when she quite rudely sent a jolt up his spine, hitting Ryuu in the process. 'Sucks to be you, toaster!'

"You need to report the mission and tell them about  _that_ ," he said, jerking a thumb at the beacon. "They're not going to see it in the storm, get me?"

'Then why did you ask me to make it!?' she demanded.

"Wanted to see if you could."

She sank back, fuming, power sent crackling and blue washing over her skin in waves.

"You don't scare me," he snorted, waving a massive hand. "And tell Suzu I'll be home soon," he added in lower tones, coughing to try and hide his slight blush in his hand.

'Why can't we just wait until tomorrow and travel home under our own power?' she asked suspiciously.

"Because we just walked through Wind Country monsoon season. We deserve a goddamn lift. Hell, we deserve a  _parade_. I've seen ANBU go in and never come out."

'That's a lie.'

"Jounin," he conceded. "Jounin have gone in and never come out. Chuunin, definitely."

Raiku hung her head, sighing heavily. 'This is because of that "fast as lightning" line, isn't it? I'm being punished because of the way I was born? This is discrimination. Discrimination and harassment. I'm so telling your wife.' She stood, dusting her hands off. 'Also? I'm leaving my pack. I may not come back, and then  _you'll_ have to carry it. Daisukenojo, I'm looking at you.' She grinned at the face he pulled at her and stretched her arms above her head, crackling contentedly despite the lack of positive adverb used with such an action in any other context.

'"Electrical malfunction",' Ryuu said suddenly, opening his eyes as he remembered and as she took a step to run away.

She blinked, caught off guard at the non-sequester. 'I'm sorry?'

'Your mother. You said she died of an "electrical malfunction",' he elaborated, staring into the darkness of the forest, not turning his head towards her.

'That's because she did,' she said, giving him an odd look and pelting away.

She was unprepared for the speed. As soon as she took a step she came to a halt, shrieking, feet digging deep grooves into the ground as she sought to stop herself, yanking branches she hadn't been quick enough to dodge out of her hair and in one case, out of her arm. She spun around to stare at the trail she'd left behind her in the span of only several seconds, some of the branches still glowing red at the point of severing as she'd  _exploded_  into motion and away-

She looked down at her smugly glowing hands, then back at the rapidly cleared path through the forest. In the distance- the very  _distant_  distance, surely she hadn't gone that far- her beacon shone.

Ryuu exuded boredom, but at this moment he broadcast derision to her from several kilometres away. Oh and she could just  _imagine_  the look on his face, the one with that slightly raised eyebrow and that infuriating sense of amusement at her expense. She wanted to kill him and he probably hadn't done anything.

"TRY. DODGING," Yamada's roar echoed through the trees, strangely quiet and tinny at the current difference in location.

She wasn't that loud, she wasn't going to bother trying to respond. '"Try dodging",' she echoed mockingly, pulling a face and setting her hands on her hips in exaggerated posture. '"Get me, Speedy? My name's Yamada and I think that I'm  _so tough-_ "'

There was an ominous boom from his general direction. She yelped and turned to run; the world exploded around her in a maelstrom of electricity, the forest sped towards her and her feet just kept moving as the lightning tore her through the trees and rain, overtaking the wind and ripping branches and saplings up behind her in the slipstream. Her body went too fast for her mind to keep up and her reflexes weren't quick enough to dodge  _anything_  at this sort of velocity, until suddenly they were.

She wasn't going quickly. The world was moving slowly. And then she realised that that wasn't true either, she was just moving. Her brain caught up to everything else and swore explosively, kicking electricity in the face and demanding both a cigarette to calm it down and a progress report, hog-tying her own ability and sitting on it with a steering wheel.

She could dodge: she'd be a damn poor kunoichi if she couldn't. She could jump and run and walk on water. If she could dodge a knife, she could dodge a tree. If she could dodge a senbon-

Raiku jerked her head to stop the train of low-brow humour and borderline plagiarism, the movement sending a tree exploding into another, split down in half.

With this sort of speed no one would ever be able to catch her again.

And then, because some things are stronger than lightning, she collapsed.

 

 

 

 

 

Ryuu, safely unconscious, was slung over Yamada's shoulder as they made their way back to Konoha with an escort service of Team Gai. Daisukenojo was stubbornly refusing help despite the unhealthy blue pallor of his skin, standing between Rock Lee and Tenten so they could, to his supreme embarrassment, keep an eye on him.

"So she didn't make it back at all?" Yamada frowned, turning his head to talk to the green spandex-clad Gai.

'No, my friend! But don't worry, for we s-,'

'She's in a tree,' Hyuuga Neji stated flatly, cutting him off. 'Asleep. One kilometre ahead.'

Yamada's expression flattened. "Figures she'd fall asleep," he grumbled.

'Considering all the crap she took for us in the middle of a hurricane, I think she earned it,' Daisukenojo pointed out.

Gai smiled hugely at Yamada, almost blinding him with the glare. 'Yes Yamada! You must tell me how it is your team so bravely-'

"Could someone get ready to go and get my student, please?" Yamada interrupted quickly. "She might be hurt."

Daisukenojo snorted. Tenten glanced at him. 'What's so surprising about that?'

'We're the freak team,' he said bluntly. He raised his voice. 'Yamada! Do you really think it's safe for anyone to grab her?'

"I think they're just going to have to deal with it, Shorty!" he said with malicious glee. "Gai, maybe you could do the honours? Given that you're in the springtime of your youth."

Gai's eyes teared up in joy that Yamad eyed with suspicion. 'Of course! I would gladly act to save your student, who so valiantly braved the wil-,'

'Someone. Shut. Him.  _Up_ ,' Ryuu groaned in pain, screwing his eyes further shut.

"Sacrifice won't be necessary, Gai," Yamada said, rubbing his face. "Just don't touch her skin. She uses a defensive technique that can kill pretty easily."

'That's what we're calling it now?' Daisukenojo muttered. Gai nodded and struck a strangely flamboyant pose, darting off into the trees. For a few minutes they travelled in silence interrupted only by tears of inspiration streaming down Rock Lee's face, before Daisukenojo spoke again.

'She's going to barbecue him.'

"Yep."

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku was already in motion when she woke up. She felt curiously warm, and absolutely safe. She exhaled lightly, burying her face further into fabric with a small, contented sound.

"Speedy, you waking up?"

Her good mood evaporated. She grumbled.

"Oh good. Mind telling me what happened?"

'F'got to breathe,' she grumbled screwing her eyes further shut to try and cling to the last vestiges of sleep, hands fisting in a strange-feeling material.

'Who the  _hell_  forgets to breathe, toaster?'

She cracked open an eye to squint around her blearily. A perfectly round pair of eyes stared down at her, framed by a terrifyingly shiny black bowl cut.

She stared.

Then she shrieked.

Rock Lee yelped and tried desperately to keep a hold on her as she struggled to get free, screaming loudly. Ryuu's eyes shot open and she caught the movement in her peripheral when he flung a hand out in protective response-

 

 

 

 

 

'This is the worst rescue in the history of Konoha,' Daisukenojo grumped, expression flat. Ryuu walked alongside him, hands in his pockets.

The grey haired boy shrugged. 'At least I got to knock out Rock Lee.'

Might Gai carried his unconscious student with mournful tears streaming down his face, cradling Rock Lee carefully. 'How could you be so lacking in youthful empathy!?'

'Practice,' Ryuu said dryly.

'I'm surprised it was you, not toaster,' Daisukenojo muttered, casting an eye over to Raiku's recently concussed form. 'She usually… y'know. Explodes when she freaks out?'

'She explodes?' Tenten asked from next to them, expression menacing. 'She  _explodes_  and you're making Neji carry her?'

'He should be alright, as long as he doesn't make any sudden movements,' Daisukenojo snickered. At the expression on Tenten's face, he looked away hurriedly.

Neji's face was impassive, as it always was, carrying the unconscious Gairano without any apparent difficulty.

'At least she's not heavy,' Ryuu said, perfectly deadpan.

'Yeah, that'll totally make up for the exploding.'

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku woke up slowly this time, since her brain had evidently learned its lesson. A pale shape swam into view as the pounding of her head increased. The unsteady figure of a face made itself known, and she squinted to try and focus. The face was quite beautiful, with the pale eyes of a Hyuuga. But the blurring of its edges made telling gender impossible, roughly until she caught sight of the long hair.

' 'Lo,' she said woozily, tilting her head as best she was able. 'Have we… met?'

'No,' an indistinct voice said. She frowned under the mask, brow wrinkling slightly.

'Your voice… is really deep for a girl…' she mumbled, blinking owlishly, lifting a finger to poke him in the chest. 'Sorta… flatchested, too… '

The arms supporting her stiffened, and she dimly heard hysterical laughter, before something dark rushed up to meet her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

'I cannot approve the use of the Gentle Fist technique on a hapless maiden!' Gai exclaimed, shooting Neji a melodramatically vengeful look. The Hyuuga didn't appear to care.

Daisukenojo wiped a tear of laughter from his eye, leaning on Ryuu for support. 'Brilliant!' he cackled. 'Absolutely brilliant!'

' _And_  he called her a hapless maiden!' Ryuu added, shoulders shaking with repressed laughter.

Yamada coughed, trying to hide his smirk. Neji held the girl with faint distaste, slightly away from his body. Well he was trying to- Raiku was one of the great thrifty members of the Gairano family, and believed in body heat instead of air conditioner. She buried her face in his chest, curling up into a ball as best she was able, exhaling lightly.

"I wouldn't let her face touch your skin," Yamada advised. "That would hurt, get me? Or your hands."

'Consider it done,' Neji said darkly.

Blissfully unaware, Raiku slept on.


	13. maternal terror

Raiku awoke in a splendour she was unaccustomed to. In other words, a room without makeshift doors and windows. She also couldn't open her eyes more than a sliver, which was less than ideal, but she could actually feel something other than the rush in her blood. The fact that it was pain was a mild drawback, and at least this time it was only in her head.

She tried to frown, ending up with a mild twitch of her lips. Where was she? And why was her forehead bandaged? This way of waking up was severely overrated in shinobi circles. Granted, the average shinobi woke up to see the tearful face of a suddenly-requited Love Interest.

She paused in realisation. Her eyes slowly slid to her bedside.

 _Not Daisukenojo,_  she panicked.  _He's too-_

Short? part of her mind volunteered.

_Angry. I was going to say angry._

'This is the second time we've been stuck with her while she sleeps off something that's Yamada's fault,' Ryuu said in a distinctly bored fashion somewhere beyond her peripheral vision. She almost blacked out again in relief: no Love Interest here then! She was free! Free to live the life of a spinster-

Wait a second. It occurred to her there was something wrong with her priorities.

'Could be worse. It could be us,' Daisukenojo snorted, absently reaching over and tugging a piece of hair out of her face. His own hair instantly lifted off his scalp with the static, and Ryuu snorted at him in amusement.

'You honestly think this sort of crap happens to us, or ever will?'

'I hope not,' Daisukenojo muttered.

'Crazy shit happens around her, and only around her. She's as bad as Uzumaki.'

Something very cold was creeping up her spine, and Raiku sincerely hoped it was realisation. Was it possible that…

She was the Drama catalyst here?

Her eyes widened as much as they could (marginally) as she tried to think back. A freckled face leaned over her, raising an eyebrow and largely ignored. 'Toaster, you with us here?'

She was starting to panic. Improbable hair? Right now, yes. Improbable eyes? Hell yes! Strange abilities!?

Oh sweet god of thunder.

'She's freaking out,' Daisukenojo frowned, hazel eyes flicking over her as her breaths shallowed, jerking a thumb towards the door. 'Go get Yamada.'

'I really hope you didn't just tell me what to do, Hatori,' Ryuu said coldly.

'You know, you could try to be less of a bastard for once in your life!'

'Maybe if you weren't such a goddamn  _moron_  I wouldn't act like one at all!'

'Raiku's no moron and you're mean to her too!'

And she was brought up in arguments? Any second now an Equaliser was going to bust through that door and kill them all.

Any second now.

' _Raiku_  is constantly getting herself into trouble and I'm always the one who helps her out! You call that being mean, huh?'

Her teammates did unexpected favours for her and refused thanks! Granted they refused thanks by being bastards and making her stop wanting to thank them at all, but the principle applied!

'Ouch,' she croaked.

'Shut up, Raiku, we're trying to have a conv-,' Daisukenojo trailed off mid-word and looked back down. 'Toaster? Can you hear me?'

'Yes,' she winced.

'We're at Yamada's house, because Hyuuga-bastard refused to carry you up to the Gairano compound. Since you called him a girl. That was freaking awesome,' he grinned in recollection. 'You said he was a flat-chested girl with a deep voice! I'm going to tell that story every time I hear his name.'

'What's with you and Hyuugas?' Ryuu asked, leaning into her range of sight from somewhere above her head. His eyes were even more disconcerting upside down. 'First Hinata, now Neji…'

'What's next- the clan head?'

She frowned up at them blearily clearing her throat. 'Why is it,' she rasped. 'That you both argue until it's time to pick on me? Then you suddenly get along- why?'

'Because you're pathetic,' Ryuu explained.

'Because I've got six little brothers and sisters  _just_ as annoying. Call it reflex,' Daisukenojo shrugged, equally blasé.

She nodded wearily. 'Got it.'

He lowered his voice, glancing around surreptitiously. 'You've gotta watch out for his wife, toaster- she's  _insane_. Not insane like you, even, she's just crazy. Got it?'

'Isn't she pregnant?' she asked slowly, brow wrinkling.

He nodded, giving her a dubious look. 'Yeah,' he said, as though his point were very, very obvious. 'And all pregnant people are insane.'

'I don't want to hear about how you're scared of pregnant people again, Hatori,' Ryuu said, glaring.

Raiku watched the conversation being conducted over her head with bemusement, eyes flicking between them as Daisukenojo rolled his eyes.

'I'm not scared of them, it's just freakish. They're one and a half people: it's unnatural!'

'You think pregnant people are unnatural…?' Raiku interjected. Daisukenojo flushed with embarrassment.

'See, when you say it like that it sounds really bad.'

'That's because it is really bad,' Ryuu said dryly.

'Look, if you tell Yamada that I said that about his wife he'll kill me,' Daisukenojo hissed. 'My life is in your spider-like fingers.'

Raiku lifted her head up to look down at her hands, frowning. 'My fingers are not like spiders…'

'I was talking to Ryuu,' he said, putting a hand on her forehead bandages and pushing her back down forcefully.

Ryuu smirked wickedly.

'Oh hell no,' Daisukenojo said, narrowing his eyes. 'I'll fight you if I have to.'

'Please don't,' Raiku said worriedly. She was promptly ignored.

'Oh really?' Ryuu said, smirk growing even more pronounced. He leaned further over her, shadow falling over her face. Her brow creased even more.

'If you fight you're going to squish me. I feel that's counterproductive to my recovery process,' Raiku offered nervously, shrinking down on the futon.

'Yeah, really,' Daisukenojo said, shifting forward.

'In fact, maybe we should all agree to be friends! Friends, anyone?'

'I'm going to enjoy kicking your ass, Hatori.'

Raiku paused, taking in the scant inches between the faces above her. 'Are you two… going to kiss or something?' she asked with some small measure of doubt. She screwed her eyes shut and prepared for pain.

There was the sound of two boys trying to get as far away from each other as possible as quickly as possible. To be more specific, there was a loud series of scuffles and crashes.

The door slid open very slowly, and all other sound ceased.

'Boys,' a low female voice said cautiously. A woman with dark blonde hair and green eyes leaned in from the hallway, heavy bags and lines of exhaustion under her narrowed green orbs. 'I hope you're not disturbing the patient… You wouldn't disturb the patient… Would you boys?'

Her slow, disjointed sentences had an effect on the two that Raiku would spend the rest of her life trying to emulate. Two pale faces gave subtle signs for 'no', 'never' and 'please spare my life'.

Her eyes narrowed even further, and she resembled nothing less than some sort of grim spectre hanging from the doorframe. 'Maybe… you should go help my husband make lunch…?' she asked softly, eyes dragged from one to the other.

Two slow, cautious nods.

'Good,' she said, so softly it was almost hidden in the breath it took to say it. She moved inside the room fully, allowing them the room to use the door. Raiku noticed, for the first time, that she was heavily pregnant. She was quick, but not always on the uptake. Especially when concussed.

'How  _did_  I get a concussion…?' she wondered, frowning. The revelation as to her role could wait until she could confront her father.

'Rock Lee… dropped you,' Yamada's wife, Suzuki said slowly, putting a hand on her covered forehead.

'I don't think you should touch me,' Raiku said, wincing. 'Since you're… pregnant, and all.'

'Yama-kun has told me about your condition,' she said mildly.

'Yama- oh, yeah, married,' Raiku remembered, rolling her eyes at herself. She coughed awkwardly. 'Yes. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.'

The woman sent her a smile. Raiku's skin broke out in goosebumps. 'It's not an inconvenience.'

'Right…' she said slowly, dragging herself up with some screaming of the muscles in her arms. 'Maybe… I should help with lunch too…'

'You should rest,' Suzuki said softly.

'I'd… I'd rather help with lunch,' Raiku began. Anger flashed across Suzuki's face.

'I said you should get some rest!'

Raiku shrunk back, eyes wide. She nodded mutely.

Suzuki smiled. 'Thank you Raiku.'

She nodded again, fingers digging into either side of the futon.

Suzuki straightened and waddled silently from the room. Raiku exhaled heavily in relief, running a shaking hand through her hair. Her electricity, equally terrified of the frightening woman, clung to her hand reassuringly, making the strands stick directly up. Yamada's wife's mood swings were as bad as his were! Possibly worse!

It was official.

She had to escape.

She moved her legs to the side of the futon, shivering as bare skin met cool air. She edged along towards the end, eyes firmly fixed on the door. She reached out for the bag she could see in her peripheral, other hand double checking her mask. She'd had the foresight to pull it up before the exhilaration of her run had made her forget to breathe, so luckily her exposure was at a minimum.

She knew she had to talk to her father about her Drama Level. It had never occurred to her she even  _had_  one, but it was increasingly obvious that there were a lot of things she simply hadn't considered. Like Yamada: he'd looked perfect at first glance. Happily married, blissfully in fact. Powerful but not exceptional, former member of ANBU who'd come out relatively unscathed. But then there was his wife.

What a wife.

She wasn't a kunoichi but she was  _excessively_  dangerous, coming from an obscure Mist village after Yamada had been posted there. She hadn't read the whole damn report on her teammates, but that had stuck out. Something about instantaneous and hideously painful death upon the exercising of her will.

It just figured that Yamada would go and screw up her Drama Balance like that by marrying some sort of super-weapon.

She timidly reached for her forehead protector, which was looking suspiciously immaculate. She tied it on over her bandages and winced. Obviously Rock Lee had dropped her onto a rock of some kind. She didn't remember that, but there was something else that seemed sort of important that was pressing at the front of her mind…

_She'd called Hyuuga Neji a girl._

Her eyes widened. They'd told her earlier, even teased her about it. But actually remembering it was significantly more traumatising.

There were now two reasons for the Hyuuga family to try and kill her.

She groaned, hitting her forehead in frustration. Stupid stupid stupid! Of course he wasn't a girl, he was just… pretty? No, pretty was a bad word to associate with the shinobi genius. It would inevitably come out and then there'd be three reasons. Beautiful? No. Handsome? Handsome! Handsome was a nice, masculine word that she could attach to him without someone trying to assassinate her for emasculating him! Brilliance!

She paused as something occurred to her, bringing her grand total to two epiphanies that day and well beyond the human norm. 'Maybe it's because I've been around so many high Drama Levels?' she whispered to herself incredulously. It made sense. She'd been born because her mother had done the same thing, so the process must attach itself to someone. Whether it's an unborn child or the person themself in the child's absence?

Raiku took a deep breath to calm herself. Vengeance was an Uchiha thing, not a Gairano thing. She tried to look for the bright side. 'At least I didn't try to compliment his figure,' she said to herself calmly, rubbing her temples.

There was an affronted silence. She closed her eyes.

_Please, God. No._

The door slid open warily. Suzuki's head peered in and partially obstructed the view of green spandex and shiny black hair. 'Raiku, some members of Team Gai are here to speak to you,' she murmured.

'I'm unconscious,' Raiku said instantly.

'But friend, you're speaking! How can you possibly be unconscious?' a friendly voice exclaimed. She could hear the exclamation marks sliding into place.

'I'm… awake… suddenly, thank you,' she said weakly, hanging her head. 'Rock Lee, is it just you and Gai out there? I can't really afford any exposure to Drama Catalysts before I can see my family…'

Rock Lee slid past Suzuki into the room, leaning down to study her with those curiously round eyes. 'No, my brave friend! But Yamada has told us all about your valiant efforts that allowed your team to safely cross the desert! We are truly in awe of your abilities!' He nodded enthusiastically, and his eyes shone. She inched back, wary of tears of inspiration.

'Oh… Thank you…' she said awkwardly. He seized her hands, pulling a yelp from her, staring deep into her eyes. That in and of itself was impressive. Her eyes were a direct light source, so staring into them- deeply into them no less- would actually burn the retinas. One more thing she could thank her power for: there would be no soliloquies about her eyes, no romanticisation and no risk.

'I myself cannot use my chakra either! I feel that we are truly kindred spirits, working to overcome our own hardships to better protect Konoha and enjoy the springtime of our youth!'

'Okay,' she said slowly, eyes wide as she tried to process all of what he'd said. 'Who told you that?'

'Ryuu!' he answered promptly, giving her hand a light squeeze.

'Okay,' she said, nodding to herself. 'I'm going to murder him. But who else came with you?'

Please let it be Tenten, she thought to herself.

Behind Lee, someone cleared their throat.

What Raiku did next was instinctive, and so while technically her fault, not necessarily her will. She leaned to the side to see around the spandex bodysuit, tilting her head.

Perfectly blank white eyes watched her with a vaguely accusing hostility.

'Raiku?' Lee asked, moving her hands slightly to get her attention. 'Raiku?'

She tugged a hand free, inching it towards her sandal.

'Raiku, no!' he cried as she flung it at the door and a truly stunned Hyuuga Neji.

'The power of obscurity compels you to stop making my life more dramatic!' she exclaimed.

'Raiku, Neji carried you here!' Rock Lee protested, instantly trapping her hands in his own again despite her struggles. 'You shouldn't lash out at him!'

'I'm not going to let some greater Plot affect my life! I don't care who I have to avoid or throw shoes at! I've got another one!' she threatened, shooting him an accusing glare.

'Neji, I fear that Raiku is still suffering the effects of her concussion!' Lee exclaimed, shooting a worried look over his shoulder. 'We should depart until she is more recovered so that she ceases to aggravate you through footwear!'

'Never!'

'What are you babbling about, Gairano?' Neji asked coldly, crossing his arms across his chest. Unable to throw anything at him, she settled for glowering. The effect was ruined by her forehead protector slide down to cover one eye.

'I'm going home!' she announced, completely failing at any sort of subtlety and crossing into the realm of the painfully obvious. She stood, using Lee's that grip as support. 'I'm not going to be murdered by a Hyuuga for ruining their dignity for the second time!'

Lee sent her a horrified look

'Second Hyuuga, second offence,' she elaborated.

He nodded in relief. 'But Neji is a very forgiving man!'

Raiku's eyes slid over to the man in question. If looks could kill, she'd never have to worry about electrocuting anyone again.

'Leaving!' she announced firmly, picking up her pack. She wasn't dizzy and she wasn't nauseous. She was also convinced that if she told herself that enough, it would become true.

Suzuki trapped her at the door. The air dropped in temperature as the thin arm slammed out to hit the doorframe between Neji and Raiku's faces. Raiku's was the only one that displayed real shock- Neji just blinked and widened his eyes slightly.

'We made lunch,' Suzuki reminded her with kindness her arm failed to imply. 'You should eat.'

'I think I should go, actually,' Raiku said cautiously, eyes darting between her hand and her face.

Aforementioned face darkened.

'Lunch!' Raiku said brightly. 'I'd be happy to!'

'In that case we will no longer impinge upon your bountiful hospitality!' Gai exclaimed, and tiny sparkles danced in the air around his teeth. Even Raiku didn't do that on her own. 'Farewell, sweet maid-'

'I  _insist_ ,' Suzuki hissed to him, eyes burning, the bags under her eyes suddenly incredibly pronounced. Even Neji recoiled slightly, but Gai managed to cower away with impressive speed.

'Of course!' he said, from a very, very respectable distance, tears of fear in his eyes. 'Anything the lady requires!'

And that was how Raiku found herself sitting at a table with her captain, a Hyuuga, Might Gai, Rock Lee and the scariest woman alive.

The Hyuuga glowered at her as if it were her fault. And yes, the bruise on his neck was technically her fault, if not, as previously stipulated, her will. Might Gai and Rock Lee discussed Yamada's unique brand of taijutsu with avid enthusiasm: Yamada's style being 'kill them, kill them good'.

Ryuu joined them after she'd been seated awkwardly under the hostile scrutiny of the Hyuuga for a few minutes, cupping his hand around her ear to whisper in it. 'Check out the kitchen.'

She blinked owlishly, and leaned to the side.

Daisukenojo sent her a pleading look, trapped in an apron with frills on it. He held a spatula in one agonisingly embarrassed hand. The spatula, in its defence, was quite embarrassed too. Frills? That was simply poor taste.

She quietly excused herself and made her way into the kitchen, staring at him. 'What are you doing?' she hissed.

He shrugged helplessly. 'She told me to!'

'Don't you have four sisters to practice resisting on?!' she demanded quietly, gesticulating wildly. She felt the Hyuuga continue to glare at her through the wall, and tried her best to ignore it.

'She looked at me all… weird!' he hissed. 'Like she was going to cry!'

She stared at him. '… Women cry all the time!'

'Not around me, they don't! My mother always made damn sure I wouldn't let a girl cry around me!' He flushed at the revelation, and to her shock, started to fidget. 'You… You're meant to look after girls,' he admitted quietly, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. 'And since my dad died, I've been looking after all of them. So I guess it's just… habit?' he offered helplessly, staring at his feet.

'You never look after me,' she grumbled, doing her best to ignore the back story.

He looked up. 'What?' he asked, brow wrinkling in confusion.

'Nothing,' she sighed. She held a hand out. 'Give me the spatula. I'll see what I can do.'

She resisted the urge to roll up her sleeves, turning and staring at the kitchen stubbornly. She wouldn't be the first Gairano to ever fail in the face of domesticity.

Surely it couldn't be that much more complicated than instant miso.


	14. attention and broken fingers

'Allow me to see if I get this straight,' he father said slowly, standing in front of her as she tried in vain to make her long legs fit the tiny desk. 'You were at Yamada's house.'

'Yes,' she confirmed, fidgeting uncomfortably under the soot.

'And you… offered to help with lunch to escape the grasp of a Hyuuga,' he said, nodding to himself, hands clasped behind him at the small of his back, shoulders perfectly squared. 'A wise course of action. However,' he added, a small muscle under his eye twitching slightly. ' _When_  you actually tried to help with lunch…'

'The rice cooker exploded,' she finished helpfully. She winced at the look he threw her.

'After that,' he gritted out through his teeth, hands tightening on his own wrists. 'You then… fled, Yamada's house as he pursued you… At which point you found yourself on top of a building?'

'…Sounds about right,' she said evasively.

'When Yamada told you to come down, you refused. He then  _threatened_  you with entry into the incredibly dangerous and  _incredibly dramatic chuunin exams_ ,' he said, ending in an enraged hiss.

'… Yes,' she admitted, sliding down in her seat.

'And you  _still refused_.'

'…This sounds a lot worse than it is,' she began reluctantly, but he cut her off.

'No, I don't think that this  _could_  be any worse, Raiku, not unless you'd stripped and gone to hug the Hokage!' he exploded, hands thudding down onto the desk in front of her. 'Do you have any idea what you've done!?' he demanded as she shrunk back. 'You've completely destroyed the balance! You were  _not_  supposed to be in these chuunin exams, because we have spent decades deciphering the Kyuubi Plot and it does not, in any way, involve you. These chuunin exams however, are involved, and so when you were signed up for them you completely ruined  _everything_  that we have built! We can't read the Plot anymore, Raiku, because it's changed, and it's changed because you're in it!'

Raiku flinched as that same, curiously leaden feeling settled in her stomach. She couldn't bring herself to meet his enraged gaze. Her father was a gentle man, but in his mind lay the same segment that hers possessed- the part that was entirely Gairano.

And that part did not take kindly to being disobeyed.

She wanted to bring up her suspicions, her fear that she was in fact more a Catalyst than Gairano and that she would only continue to bring Drama to the people she cared for, bring conflict and pain to her friends and family. But now wasn't the time. In the face of the family's anger, she was beginning to believe there would never be a time.

'I'm sorry,' she said instead, and felt shame clog her throat.

He jerked back from her so violently it resembled recoiling more than anything else, a shaking hand coming up to cover his eyes, failing to reach and simply lying suspended in the air between them. 'I love you, Raiku,' he said quietly, almost distantly, stretching out to put his hand on her head, ignoring the painful jolt as his skin came too close to hers. 'Remember that no matter how angry I get, I love you. But I'm not always proud of you.'

She nodded, eyes downcast.

'We can fix this,' he muttered to himself, removing his hand. 'It simply needs time to correct itself once you've been removed.'

He turned back to her.

'Raiku, you need to fail the exams.'

She sagged in relief. 'Oh good,' she sighed. 'I thought this was going to be hard.'

 

 

 

 

 

She tried to hide her smile when two genin she didn't recognise refused to let them even enter the exam room. Daisukenojo glowered from several inches below her line of sight, though she noticed with some small amount of annoyance that he was going to outgrow her soon. Above her own eye level Ryuu's cold, dispassionate gaze flicked over the doors and the people congregating there, and between the two of them she found a feeling not unlike security. Flanked by two people who had proven that not only did they not care about her abnormalities but in fact cared so little as to tease her gave her a sense of belonging she was rapidly growing accustomed to. Daisukenojo moved forward to say something to the genin, but an arm flashed in front of Raiku to grasp his shoulder. The volatile redhead turned, a snarl ready on his face, cut off by Ryuu's pointed look.

Reluctantly he settled back, crossing his arms over his chest.

Ryuu dropped his own arm, shifting the grass in his mouth thoughtfully as he observed the growing scene. They were early, and in the plain, brightly lit hall there seemed little sense of urgency. Raiku adjusted the edge of her mask, glad for the growing cool of autumn, and briefly considered just …

Never going in at all.

It wasn't uncommon for genin to die during these exams, and while she knew she had to fail, she found herself reluctant to either die or allow her teammates to die. She mused briefly on her attachment to them and found it lacking in the profound at her initial glance, and thus of minimal risk.

'This isn't where we're supposed to be,' Ryuu murmured into her ear, letting her know with a flick of his eyes towards Daisukenojo that she should pass on the message. She did so and responded to his questioning look with a jerk of her head towards Ryuu.

Ryuu let his eyes linger meaningfully on the sign.

'It's the right place,' she whispered in his ear in confusion, looking at the number.

'No,' he answered with a slight shake of his head. 'It's not.' His lips twitched upwards as he looked down at both of them, a curious look in his eyes. After a moment, she nodded, turning back to face the door.

Daisukenojo's suspicion abated at that same look, and he grudgingly turned away, dismissing Ryuu with a jerk of his head.

Raiku couldn't help the smile that split across her face, creasing her eyes warmly.

Ryuu looked down over her head at Daisukenojo questioningly. He shrugged, elbowing her lightly in the side.

'We're acting like a team!' she said proudly, setting her hands on her hips. 'Finally!'

Ryuu exhaled lightly in a sound that could have passed for an amused one, while Daisukenojo just jabbed her harder and accompanied the gesture with a roll of his eyes.

There was a strange squeak. She turned her head to look over her shoulder, frowning in exasperation. 'Did either of you hear that?' she asked the boys, eyebrow twitching.

'The squeak? Sure,' Daisukenojo shrugged.

She narrowed her eyes, scanning the plain hallway and the overshadowed alcove leading to the stairs. 'I  _know_  I've heard that somewhere before…' she muttered to herself, resisting the sudden, violent urge to destroy the wall that hid the stairs themselves from view.

Ryuu tilted his head. 'I think …' he said slowly. Daisukenojo sniggered immaturely, ignored by both of them. 'That that squeak… is because of you,' he finished eventually.

'Me?' she blinked in surprise, pointing to herself. 'Because of me?'

'I've heard that squeak five times,' he explained. 'And only when you've been here.'

'Five? I've only heard it twice,' she muttered.

'My ears are much better. C'mon,' he said, dropping his voice to be inaudible but all but those two. 'We need to go to the right floor.'

One of the genin guarding the door, bandages stretched across his nose, winked at her roguishly as she turned back. Puzzled, she looked to Ryuu for an explanation and found his expression murderous.

'Come on,' he repeated, turning stiffly on his heel. Raiku blinked and threw a somewhat distracted wave at the genin in that curious grey uniform, following after him.

The walls shook slightly as they walked towards the door to the outer stairs, and Plot oozed.

She flinched, paling. 'Gotta go gotta go gotta go…' she muttered to herself, speeding up just as Uzumaki Naruto rounded the corner to the fake exam room.

It was when she reached the real room Raiku realised just how deep the trouble she was in was.

A room full of shinobi from almost every country, all terrifying and tough looking greeted her. Condescending smirks mixed with malicious gazes until it was simply a sea of unwelcome faces around the rows of desks leading down to the front, and she could already feel her youth weighing her down in their eyes.

'Got any … y'know… left?' Daisukenojo muttered into her ear, not moving his eyes from the crowd. His short stature was earning him sniggers.

She nodded mutely.

'Wanna get rid of the competition?' he joked weakly.

She turned her horrified gaze on him, pulling back her fist and letting fly.

Ryuu leaned back to look at Daisukenojo stumbling back, holding his jaw. 'It was a joke!' Daisukenojo exclaimed, somewhat muffled by his own hand. 'Joke, toaster, people make those sometimes!'

'Nice,' Ryuu smirked to her.

'Don't you ever joke about that,' she muttered, shooting him a serious look. 'Ever.'

'You three… you're rookies just graduated from the academy, right?' someone asked- drawled, she corrected- from their left. She glanced over with a carelessness that surprised even her. Ryuu didn't bother.

A young man with almost femininely fine features, glasses and long pale hair tied into a low ponytail faced them, hands in his pockets. He wore the headband of Konoha, but his eyes were colder than any shinobi she'd seen prior.

She blinked at him.

'Yeah,' Daisukenojo said, siphoning some of Ryuu's natural boredom to his aid. 'What about it?'

'Such cute faces… You're all still messing around, huh?'

Raiku's eyes flicked to him for longer this time. 'Why… does face matter to a shinobi?' she puzzled.

'It doesn't,' Ryuu dismissed, yawning with deliberately offensive flippancy. 'He's trying to psych you out because you look like a wimp.'

'I… I am a wimp,' she pointed out.

'Yeah. But he's not scary,' he explained, smirking coldly.

'It does matter,' the pale haired man corrected, sly eyes flicking between them and taking in the bruise on Daiskenojo's jaw. 'Look around you.'

'Ryuu, no!' Raiku hissed, grabbing his hand as it started to rise. 'You do not cause alkalosis in strangers!'

He shot her a bemused look, lowering his hand.

The pale-haired man sighed. 'I'm Yakushi Kabuto. I'm just giving you a warning now, since everyone's tense before the exams? I'm not trying to psych you out.'

'Thank… you?' Raiku offered tentatively, giving him a friendly eye crease. 'I'm sorry for my teammate- he's tense toooooh that's my hand,' she broke off mid word into another, looking down at the hand still intertwined with Ryuu's, grasped tight enough to hurt. 'Yes, okay, thank you for warning us, Yakushi!' she squeaked, desperately trying to pry her hand free.

He shot her an exasperated, if amused look. 'Would you like some more help? It must be frightening entering the exams so soon after graduation.' His smile was kind, and the Plot hanging off him malignant, festering half-in half-out of his body with the occasional outburst of a terror-filled voice escaping.

'I don't think I'll pass, so no-  _I have a hand, and its name is pain_ ,' she whimpered as Ryuu's grip tightened even more.

'Sure,' Daisukenojo answered Yakushi, stepping forward. 'Sounds like a good idea. That's it you guys are done handholding,' he added, jerking a thumb at them.

Yakushi smiled at them reassuringly.

'Daisuke,' Raiku whispered, eyes wide and earnest. 'I don't think we should listen to him.'

He raised an eyebrow.

'Well,' she swallowed thickly as she felt the bones in her hand move against each other in a distinctly unnatural way. 'He may have to fight us later… yeah? So… if he gives us bad information then he improves his own chances.'

Yakushi watched the quiet exchange with raised eyebrows. 'Are you… alright?' he asked, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly.

Inside his Plot a woman screamed.

'Yes Yakushi,' she said, doing her best to bow without moving her hand. 'But I think we should take our seats.'

The pressure alleviated slightly. Good sign! She was on the right track.

'After all,' she added hastily. 'We wouldn't want to miss out for something as dumb as not having seats, right?'

The pressure remained the same. Damnit! She strived to think of something she might have missed. 'Thank you for offering to help us, Yakushi!' she smiled sweetly. 'I'm sorry we didn't arrive soon enough to benefit from your experience.'

The pressure almost vanished. Yakushi seemed flattered, smiling with equal happiness. 'Just come to me if you need help… What was your name, I'm sorry?' he asked mildly.

Oh, there went the metacarpals. No fingers for her. 'We're team Yamada,' she smiled, improvising. She used the crippling grip on her hand to steer Ryuu away, pulling Daisukenojo with her before he could persist and ask for her real, specific name.

Ryuu cast her a dark look as the three found a space, Daisukenojo moving to sit directly in front of them in the only other spare seat they could immediately locate. 'You want to explain to dear Daisuke the problem with that guy's advice any louder, toaster?' he gritted out.

'My hand!' she exclaimed, gingerly rubbing her heavily bruised fingers. 'You killed my hand!'

'Focus, toaster!'

'I needed that! I only have two!' she lamented, sniffing slightly. 'That… that hurt so bad…'

'If I fix your hand, will you shut the hell up?' Daisukenojo grimaced. She nodded. He held out his own freckled, square hand, pulling her gloved, thin one towards him. 'You're such a wimp,' he muttered, not without affection, as a pale glow surrounded his fingers.

'I didn't know you knew any healing techniques,' Ryuu observed, leaning forward in his seat. Daisukenojo shrugged, pinching her skin through her glove as she stretched her tingling fingers.

'My mother's a medic, and since everyone in my family has really good chakra control  _and_  we're always getting into fights, she thought it would be a good idea to teach me this stuff. Sort of like you two.'

Raiku was so accustomed to the guilt of hiding things she no longer actually felt it. She nodded in understanding. 'It must be really nice… to know you can fix people,' she murmured.

'I prefer breaking them,' he grinned. She blinked, looking up from her hand to his face.

'Do you really?' she asked, tilting her head slightly.

He opened his mouth to reply, but a loud exclamation cut him off.

'My name is Uzumaki Naruto! I'm not going to lose to any of you!' Naruto cried from the back of the room, pointing to the crowds at large.

Raiku flinched. Behind him Yamanaka Ino picked a loud, aggravated fight with Haruno Sakura, the girl who had glared so angrily at Raiku the day of graduation.

She straightened on the bench to catch a glimpse of the other recommended rookie genin, and caught Hinata hurriedly ducking out of sight with…

'A squeak!' she cried triumphantly, surging up in her seat to point at Hinata.

Every face in the room turned towards her with dubious and in some cases openly hostile expressions.

'Toaster, sit down,' Ryuu said quietly, hiding his face in his hand. In the seat in front of her, Daisukenojo went scarlet with secondhand embarrassment, sliding down out of sight.

'It was YOU!' Raiku continued on, pointing at Hinata, apparently immune to awkwardness in her moment of triumph. Since Hinata was hiding behind her Aburame teammate, this was somewhat awkward. His brow furrowed above black sunglasses that completely hid his eyes, and the high collar made any other indication of emotion impossible to see. 'YOU'RE the one that's been hiding from me!'

'I have perpetrated no such action,' Aburame said. She flicked her hand dismissively.

'Not you, Aburame, Hinata!'

There was another squeak.

'Oh come on!' she exclaimed in frustration. 'I can totally see you!' She vanished with a loud yelp of surprise as Ryuu yanked her savagely downwards, almost cracking her head on the table in front of her.

Aburame half-turned to look at his teammate, raising his eyebrows. She went scarlet under his and every other rookie's scrutiny. 'I-I…' she began in embarrassment, trailing off abashedly.

Kiba rested a hand on her head, ruffling her hair. 'It's a secret, so back off!' he grinned.

Raiku shoved her way free of the bench, landing in one of the aisles on steady feet and turning on her heel to face the rookies, striding towards them quickly. 'Hinata?' she asked, leaning around the Aburame to try and catch a glimpse of her. 'Hinata? I'm sorry I yelled, but I do know you're there,' she frowned in confusion, taking a step around the far taller boy.

His face was overshadowed. 'You both use me as some accessory,' he muttered.

'Hinata…?' she asked slowly, moving to stand between the Aburame and the crowd, placing her closer to Hinata.

A dark shape, moving so quick as to be a blur, darted between her and the Aburame. She blinked in surprise, head instantly following it and making it a discernable shape-

'That shinobi… looks like a porcupine,' she observed. Another sped past her to follow the one that was after Yakushi, and she secretly hoped that they would kill him.

The woman's scream echoed in her ears.

The boy trod on her foot heavily- probably on purpose- and she gave a brief, incoherent exclamation, hopping on one foot and cursing to herself in a distinctly undignified way. She narrowed her eyes spitefully at his back, growling under her breath as she clutched her foot. He was heavy, and he was going to  _pay._

She turned to give up and pursue it another time just as another blur, resolving it as a lovely girl with dark hair when her eyes instinctively traced it, moved to dart in front of her. If he couldn't pay, she wasn't one to hold a grudge.

At least, not a specific grudge.

She stuck her injured foot out casually and unwisely.

The girl was almost fast enough to dodge, but Raiku was, after all, as fast as lightning.

 _Just remember to breathe this time_ , Raiku told herself cheerfully, smiling down at the girl mildly. 'I'm sorry, Sound-nin,' she said cheerfully, rubbing the back of her head in feigned sheepishness. 'But I don't think that three on one is fair, do you?'

And your teammate trod on my toe, she added mentally. In this situation, the team must always answer for the individual. Personal vendettas are a very, very forbidden zone. Indistinct ones aren't.

The girl snarled up at her in instantaneous outrage, jumping nimbly to her feet and sending a fist flying towards her.

At that exact moment Raiku had an epiphany.

She was a new part of this Uzumaki plot, and so she was  _allowed_  to be sort of tough. She was naturally a wimp, but she was a hard worker and Yamada worked them harder! Success and validation.

She caught the girl's fist in her own hand, tilting her head in a way she felt conveyed friendliness. 'I… think we should wait until the exams to fight, yeah?' Something slammed into her palm and made the bones vibrate painfully several seconds after she caught the hand, and the girl shrieked as something far more inconvenient surged into her through her clenched fingers through the microscopic holes in Raiku's glove, designed for that purpose. For her part, Raiku's eyebrow twitched and she gritted her teeth to stop from cursing yet again.

'You should calm down, Sound-nin,' Raiku said, forcing that cheerful smile as the girl's knees shook. 'There's… no exit wound when you're completely insulated, yeah?'

A gasp rippled through the rookies as the first porcupine-nin lashed out at Yakushi, and Raiku turned to look at the two fighting. Yakushi was standing back, unscathed, while the other stood in a distinctly offense-based position. She raised a quizzical eyebrow, and understood as the glass in Yakushi's glasses frames cracked and shattered.

'That's weird,' she frowned, turning back to the girl just in time to see her other fist flying towards her nose.

It was becoming clear that while a great many things were not in fact her fault, Raiku had, at the very least, some bad karma. Ryuu's arm shot up from his position in the aisle preparing to follow Raiku, and wrenched backwards.

The girl went flying headfirst through the air in his direction, pelting over his head to land somewhere in the crowd.

Raiku leaned forward to follow her progress. 'Thanks Ryuu!' she smiled. 'I didn't want to get in trouble so soon!'

His face was livid. Wordlessly he pointed back to their seats. She slumped, sighing, turning in surprise at the sound of retching. 'He threw up?' Sakura said worriedly, and moved forward.

Raiku blinked as Yakushi remained on all fours, looking up at the porcupine-nin who was apparently responsible. Naruto and Sakura ran to his side to grasp his arms and give him support. 'I'm fine,' he croaked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

'Really?' the foremost Sound-nin asked in a rasp, tilting his head. Coupled with his wide, visible eye, Raiku felt it made him look like a spastic owl. As the spastic broom, she felt an instant kinship. 'You're not as good as I thought for a veteran who took the exams four years running. Write  _this_  in your card: the three from the hidden village of Sound will definitely become chuunins.'

'Unless…' Raiku said slowly, flinching as his gaze transferred to her instantly. 'That girl over there is seriously hurt.' She gave a nervous laugh as his eye narrowed on her face.

The girl struggled to her feet, breathing heavily. Her heart ran faster than it ever had before, and for some reason she was getting a sympathetic look from a girl with white eyes. 'You… I will definitely kill during the exams,' she hissed to Raiku as the genin parted for her gaze to fully reach her.

Raiku didn't react as expected, as expected. She scratched the back of her head again. 'I look forward to seeing who is stronger, Sound-nin,' she said pleasantly, giving her a thumbs up. 'But you shouldn't rely on your speed to beat me: I'm pretty fast!' She paused, expression becoming worried. 'You should try to ground yourself- you have an entry wound on your hand, but no exit wound. Until the exit is established, you're going to be hurt more.'

' _Gairano. Ass. Here. Now_.'

She opened her eyes wide, looking at Ryuu. 'I'm sorry Ryuu!' she said worriedly, taking a few steps towards him. 'But I wanted to know why Hinata-,'

There was an explosion of smoke in the front of the room. 'Quiet you punks!' someone barked, stepping out of the haze. Dressed in a black trenchcoat and grey uniform, the urban legend that was Ibiki stood in front of a group of shinobi in the same grey uniform, all smirking. Two harsh scars split his face, one across the lips on the left and one reaching for his cheekbone on the right. She wondered if the bandanna-cross-forehead protector hid any more.

'Sorry to keep you waiting,' he smirked, dark eyes bordering on the predatory and staring from a harsh, angular face. 'I am the examiner of the first test of the Chuunin Selection Exam, Morino Ibiki.'

There was something wrong with her family's taste in friends, Raiku realised, staring at the familiar features of 'Uncle Morino'.

Something very, very wrong.


	15. glass and mindfuck

Raiku bit the skin between thumb and pointer finger to stop herself from openly giggling in relieved glee. This was too perfect!

Upon the paper in front of her was a series of questions so difficult she would have had  _no_  chance of answering even if she wanted to pass!

The relief bubbled up inside her and created giddiness, and her shoulders shook with repressed laughter.

The sound of pencils scratching industriously on paper was music to her ears.

She couldn't pass! Ever, from the looks of it! Again, the thought idly occurred to her that there was something wrong with her priorities. She settled back in her chair and folded her arms behind her head, preparing to relax through the exams.

She hazarded a glance over to Ryuu and found him… deep in concentration?

Her right arm slowly made its way down onto the page. She watched in utmost horror as it picked up a pencil. This was especially offensive for someone who was left handed. Ibiki had said he'd punish anyone caught cheating, and as he was the head of the ANBU Interrogation and Torture squad, this was no laughing matter!

There was abruptly an answer that looked correct on her page. She shot Ryuu a hateful glare as her hand was left to its own devices again.

This was not good. He was very determined to pass, clearly. He must have used one of his more subtle techniques to get a look at someone's answers, she assumed. She rubbed out the answer the second he looked back to his own page, hiding it with her arm and pretending to write.

"If this person throws this kunai-," she stopped reading mid-sentence and let her head fall forwards onto the desk. This was going to be a  _maths_  question.

Screw that. She'd fail under her own power.

Her shoulder itched suddenly, and she reached a hand up to scratch it irritably, pulling her hand away to find grains of… sand? Sand on her glove?

She forced back a groan at the thought; if there was sand in her clothes it would melt upon contact with her skin and fuse to the fabric when she took it off. Sand! Of all the horrible things in the world it just  _had_  to be sand! She hated sand, though she'd never felt any particular enmity towards it until right this second. She absently started to pour the grains from hand to hand, flicking them back into place when they- quite rudely and for some reason not all that inconspicuously- tried to escape.

She poured it onto her desk and started playing noughts and crosses with it.

Something slammed into the desk next to her elbow and her hand instinctively slammed down to hide her distraction. She closed her eyes and cringed as the sand became gooey and far, far hotter than it should have. A thin tendril of smoke escaped between her fingers as the desk panicked and the sand apologised hysterically for melting so unexpectedly.

She opened her eyes to look at the offending spot to find a thin steel ruler, connecting to an examiner's arm, connecting unsurprisingly to a shoulder, neck, and a head. A head with a face with bandages stretching across… the… nose?

Her eyes widened in surprise when the examiner gave her a familiar roguish wink, grinning. His grin spread at the absolutely scandalised look on her face. How old was he?! He was closer to twenty than ten, and not because he was approaching it!

'Eyes on your paper,' he said smugly. Jaw dropped, she managed to give him a look that combined scandal, horror and disbelief. He moved past with a distinctly jaunty spring in his step, and she moved her hand from the desk slowly. Sand was now glass, cooling rapidly once separated from her hand.

And now her glove had melted glass on it. She bit back yet another groan, trying in futility to flick some of it off her. Sand… who brought sand into an exam room anyway?

A kunai slammed with impossible speed onto the paper of the man next to her, provoking a chorus of mild screams as it flew past. The shinobi stood, shaking in fear and anticipation. 'What... what was that about?' he asked, wide-eyed.

The man with the bandages smirked coldly. 'Five strikes and you're out. You just failed the exam.'

'What?' the young man demanded, stumbling back until the backs of his knees hit the seat. 'It can't be!'

'You and your teammates will leave the room immediately,' the examiner continued on ruthlessly, raising a hand to point at him, making sure there could be no ambiguity about the offender. Raiku stared up at the unfortunate cheater, eyes almost as wide as his. It was clear he was being made an example of, so that anyone else cheating would be frightened and make mistakes, allowing themselves to be caught.

She looked hastily at her own paper, relieved to see Ryuu hadn't used her own arm to answer any more questions while she wasn't looking, and looked back up.

Grudgingly, two other shinobi stood with tense frames and expressions, moving into the aisles and towards the door while the offender simply stood in shock for a moment before following, arms limp at his sides.

'Candidate number twenty three- fail,' another grey-clad examiner barked.

'Numbers twenty seven and forty three- fail!' yet another added.

One of the cheaters attempted to stay at his desk and was immediately seized by two  _almost_  lightning-fast examiners, who proceeded to drag him out the doors, screaming and protesting the entire way.

'No!' another shouted, slamming his hand onto his desk as he stood. 'There's no way! Who says I cheated five times? Where's your proof!?'

Raiku winced, sliding down to make herself less conspicuous and less likely to be bled on. No one was meant to contradict Ibiki's squad. Ever. But this shinobi wore a Sand forehead-protector, so he couldn't know that…

A Konoha-nin at the front of the room with almost as little of his face showing as hers smirked, his exposed mouth bearing a sadistic hint that the bandages over his eyes would otherwise have hidden as the accused recklessly continued on. 'How can you keep track of all of us!?' he demanded, the telltale nervous sweat breaking out on his forehead as something in his brain quietly mentioned that this was a really, really  _bad_  idea… 'You got the wrong guy!' he exclaimed in addition, eyes narrowing. 'How do you know I wasn't just-,'

The covered examiner moved so quickly Raiku checked his skin for exposed sparks, moving the angry young man free of his seat and slamming him into a wall in less than a second, elbow pressed into his trachea and the other hand stuck with infuriating casualness in his pocket. 'Sorry,  _friend_ ,' he said, smirking in a way that told everyone he wasn't actually sorry at all. 'But we were chosen for this examination because we don't  _make_  mistakes like that. You don't even-,' his arm pressed tighter into the struggling man's neck, ' _blink_  without us knowing about it. We're the best, and you're history.'

He dropped his arm to let the gasping man slide to the ground, tucking the hand back in his pocket. 'Now get out. Oh, and take your teammates with you,' he added, smirk growing.

Raiku was sincerely glad she hadn't been cheating. The bandaged man was watching her like a hawk in a way that made it seem like he was daring her to do something  _just_  so he could drag her out, and she swallowed hard. This was not good. This was very, very not good.

'Fifty nine- fail.'

'Numbers thirty three and nine- fail!'

The calling of offenders had begun with full force, interrupting the exam every few minutes with knowing smirks and combat-ready tenseness as the examiners prepared to physically remove those that resisted.

Raiku was even gladder she didn't want to pass. She'd have to cheat in order to do so, and it was clear she wouldn't have stood a chance.

'Number forty one! Fail!'

'Thirty five and sixty two-  _fail_.'

She was beginning to be able to pick the examiner by how he gleefully dismissed someone. The words were pretty much the same, but where the sadistic emphasis lay on the sentence was pretty telling.

There was a yelp and a crash as someone hesitated to leave. She found herself wanting to test their awareness by sending the bandaged and inappropriately flirtatious man a rude gesture, but figured that would be an instant expulsion. And if they tried to force her out, oh no,  _that_  part of her would like that at all.

She looked down at her test and silently freaked out, trying desperately to rub out the answers that had appeared there. At the side of the room, the bandaged man broke into equally silent laughter.

_Why can't I just fail this in peace!?_

It shouldn't be this hard to fail something, especially not on purpose! She'd failed plenty of times by accident, surely this was meant to be easier!

The crosshairs of the universe aligned…

'Well,' Ibiki announced. 'Looks like we've already dropped the incompetent ones.' Instantly every pencil paused, some mid-letter, except for hers which was steadily congealing in the glass she'd thrown it into. Beseechingly the tiny drop of glass oozed towards her as it quickly solidified. She winced as a particularly powerful image of a drop of glass forming hands and saying 'mama' occurred to her. The glass had been molten in her grip, as it was simply melted sand. It was burnt into the table in an imprint of the centre of her palm when Ibiki took up position at the front of the room, scarred face split with a grin. She stared at the man who'd seen fit to bestow upon her a set of razor wires at the age of five, and smiled nervously.

'I will now give the problem… since forty five minutes have already passed. I will now give the tenth question!' he said, raising his voice to make sure he was heard- even though he knew damn well everybody would listen to him as though their lives depended on it. 'Yes,' he added slowly, smirking to himself. She knew that look! She'd seen it shortly before he'd hung her by her ankles over a river!

She sunk further down in her seat.

'But, before that, there is one thing I must tell you. There will be one special rule for this last question.'

There was a trick in here somewhere; she knew it instantly. He had that look, that look that screamed "mindfuck!" and granted, he wore it most of the time, but since he was wearing it when talking about conditions it made it a certainty.

She narrowed her eyes.

Someone came in through the doors and Ibiki simply smirked, giving a brief sound of amusement. 'You're lucky,' he informed the Sand-nin, who had returned just in time. 'Your puppet show didn't have to go to waste.' The boy's face creased in anger, the strange purple marks making it seem somehow surreal, as though his face were in fact the mask. Ibiki shrugged. 'Oh well. Sit down.'

He waited until the order was obeyed, and took a step forward, placing his hands in the pockets of that ominous black trenchcoat. 'I will now explain,' he said again.

'This is… a hopeless scenario,' he said, eyes sliding over to pin her with his gaze. She brightened. Things were looking up!

'First,' he said, turning from the window to face them. 'You are going to choose if you take the tenth problem or not.'

Raiku grinned evilly, taking care not to let it reach her eyes. She tensed to stand and walk- run, screaming- out of the room, and found she couldn't move.

Ryuu's head was bowed in concentration again. She paled, eyes unwillingly dragging back to Ibiki, who was being interrupted and questioned by yet another Sand-nin. A beautiful blonde girl with stubborn dark eyes and a mesh shirt vanishing into a purple one clenched her fists. Her hair was bound into four coarse ponytails, the Sand forehead protector around her neck. 'Choose? So what happens if we don't take the tenth problem!?'

Ibiki smirked. 'If you choose not to take it… your points will be reduced to zero. In other words- you will  _fail_. Your two other teammates will fail along with you.'

Raiku strained as hard as she could to try and escape her chair. Yes! That was  _exactly_  what she wanted! Failure, sweet, sweet failure! Whispers and questions broke out at this announcement, but for Raiku, who still couldn't move. She managed to drag her gaze to Ryuu, who was staring at her with his eyes narrowed, hands in that goddamn seal under the desk. She tried to convey through telepathy that she was going to  _murder_  him in the most horrible way she could think of, but failed.

'And here is the other condition,' Ibiki continued. 'If you choose to take it and you get it wrong…' His eyes hardened. 'You will lose the privilege to take the Chuunin Exam forever!' The room immediately fell into stunned silence.

_Yes!_

Raiku tried to lunge to her feet and felt something that felt… very, tragically important in her body twinge alarmingly as the air around her simply refused to budge.

Kiba lunged to his feet and she was immediately envious, though not of what he did next. He point at Ibiki, glowering. 'What kind of dumb rule is that!?' he demanded. 'There are people here who have taken the Chuunin Exam in the past!' The dog on his head barked for some reason. Probably in agreement, but she didn't speak dog.

Ibiki gave a low chuckle.

She winced. Oh, chuckling. He was having fun, which meant there was a big, big trick here.

'You were unlucky,' he informed Kiba, face darkening with sadistic glee. 'This year I make the rules. That is why I gave you the option of quitting. Those who are not confident can choose not to take it, and take the exam next year, or the year after that.' He chuckled again, and gathering that chuckling meant something very, very bad, the rest of the room winced with her this time.

'Let us begin,' he said darkly. 'Those who will not be taking the tenth question, raise your hands. After we confirm your numbers, we will have you leave.'

At this announcement, the room's atmosphere increased in tension exponentially. Raiku's eyes slid helplessly to her teammate, who wasn't having any of that quitting crap. His yellow eyes remained calmly levelled at Ibiki, arms resting casually in his lap to allow his hands to form the seal. Daisukenojo was sweating and slightly pale, but staring almost as intently as Ryuu, apparently unwilling to sacrifice even a year of his time as a genin.

A hand slowly raised. The rest of the genin raised with it, showing a pale, nervous man. 'I… I quit!' he forced out, screwing his eyes shut as if expecting punishment. 'I can't take it!'

'Number fifty…' a lazy examiner's voice drawled. 'Fail. Number one hundred and thirty and one hundred and eleven fail with him.' It was the other 'genin' who had blocked the fake door, whose only indication of amusement was the glint in his otherwise bored eyes. He was looking at her too- what the hell was wrong with these people!? They  _knew_  she knew Ibiki, that was the only solution.

'I'm sorry Gennai, Inaho,' the quitter said weakly, hanging his head in shame, fists clenching helplessly at his sides as two almost identically dressed genin gracefully stood.

'Me too!' another exclaimed desperately, surging to his feet as though he were afraid of losing the opportunity. As if these two failures gave them courage, yet more hands were raised, and a steady flow of people left the room almost empty compared to its previous, bustling state.

Raiku made a low keening sound, largely ignored.

And then the unthinkable happened.

Uzumaki Naruto… raised his hand

She could have cried with relief. Yes, she thought to herself. Quit, Naruto! Save me!

He slammed it onto the table, and she cringed. 'Screw you!' he growled, and she watched the Plot shift triumphantly. 'I'm not going to run away! I'll take this problem!'

Why, she wondered darkly, wishing she had her arms free so she could electrocute him to death, did he raise his hand if he wasn't going to quit? Did he enjoy teasing her?

'Even if I fail and stay a Genin forever,' he said, voice gradually rising in volume as his voice became even more determined. 'I'll find a way to become the Hokage no matter what anyway!' He rose to his feet, hands planted firmly on the desk. 'I'm not scared!'

Well, she thought to herself, fuming. That made one of them.

Ibiki stared at him impassively as he sank back into his seat, that display of inspirational courage evidently tiring even while earning him admiring looks. 'I will ask one more time,' Ibiki said. 'This is a choice that will impact upon your life- if you want to quit, now's your chance.'

Raiku didn't bother trying to struggle this time, it was clearly hopeless.

'I'm not going to take back my words,' Naruto said, smirking at Ibiki, sort of like a glass of water would smirk at the ocean. 'That's my way of the ninja.'

Pride and courage raced through the classroom, carried on the back of a Plot Device.

Ibiki stepped forward to face the newly inspired group of Genin, eyes scanning their faces before he finally spoke. 'Nice determination. Then, for the First Exam, everyone here…' he broke into a grin. 'Passes!'

Raiku, finally free, gave a silent wail of protest and buried her face in her arms while everyone else stiffened in shock.

'What's the meaning of that!?' Sakura demanded disbelievingly, standing. 'We pass already? What about the tenth question!?'

'It was a TRICK,' Raiku groaned, shoulders shaking with repressed sobs. Everyone probably assumed it was relief. 'It was a mindgame! I'm doomed! Equaliser-food!'

Her words were ignored by the room at large. Ibiki laughed, either at Sakura's shock or Raiku's horror. 'There was no such thing to begin with!' he said gleefully. 'Or you can call the two-choice question the tenth question!'

'What?' Sakura asked, eyes widening.

'Hey!' the blonde Sand-nin exclaimed, not rising from her seat. 'So what were those previous nine problems!? It was all a waste!'

'It was false hope, that's what it was,' Raiku muttered to herself tearfully.

'No it's not,' Ibiki said smugly. 'Those nine problems accomplished their purpose: to test the information gathering skills of the individual.'

The Sand-nin frowned in question.

'The first purpose of the test lies in the first rule, since your pass-fail decision is based on your three man teams. Because of that each Genin was placed under unprecedented amounts of pressure to not be a nuisance to their team. But these test problems cannot be solved by Genins. So most of the people here must have come to the conclusion "I have to cheat to get points".'

She caught Ryuu nodding in her peripheral vision and wished him pain. Endless pain.

'In other words, this exam assumed everyone was going to cheat. So we snuck in two Chuunins who knew the answers to be the targets of cheating.'

Naruto laughed loudly and awkwardly, putting his arms behind his head. 'It was so obvious!' he lied in an obvious way. 'It would have been weird not to notice it, right Hinata?'

In fact, she wished Ryuu almost as much pain as she was now wishing Naruto.

'But,' Ibiki shrugged carelessly. 'Those who cheated like a fool failed, of course.' He reached up, untying his forehead protector. 'And why? Information can have a greater value that life at times, and in missions and on the battlefield information is contested with the lives of people!'

His previously covered scalp was a horrific mess of scars, used to illustrate his point. The majority of the Genin recoiled in shock and horror. Raiku tilted her head. Burns, lacerations, coiled twists- torture marks.

'The information,' Ibiki went on as he put the bandanna back on to everyone's supreme relief, 'that an enemy gets after being noticed by a third person will not necessarily be accurate. So remember this- getting incorrect information can cause great damage to your teammates and village,' he warned. 'So we made you get information in the form of cheating, and kicked out those lacking in that field. That's what happened.'

The Sand-nin clearly either had Views on this sort of manipulation or was just pissed off. 'But I still can't agree to that kind of question!' she stated.

'But this kind question was the main question in the First Exam,' he pointed out coolly.

'What do you mean?' Sakura asked. Raiku shot her a vile glare, lifting her head slightly. She was dragging this on by asking questions he was already intending to answer!

'Let me explain,' he said predictably. 'The tenth question was a "take or take not" choice. Needless to say, it was a painful two-choice problem,' he held up two fingers to illustrate his point. 'Those who did not take it failed with their teams. If you chose to take it and could not answer it, your right to take the exam would have been taken away forever. It was an insincere problem.'

"Insincere"? she questioned dubiously within the relatively safe confines of her mind.

'How about this two-choice problem?' he asked mildly, beginning to pace at the front of the classroom. 'Let's assume you have become Chuunin, and your mission is to secure a secret document. The number of enemy ninja, their locations and armaments are unknown. There may be enemy traps set up. Will you accept this mission, or not? Just because the lives of your teammates and your life may be in danger, are you able to avoid dangerous missions? The answer is… No. There are missions with heavy risks that cannot be avoided. The ability to show courage to your teammates-,'

Well, she'd failed.

'- when needed and the ability to get through a bad situation- that is what we look for in a Chuunin and squad leader.'

Why was she here, again?

'Those who cannot bet their fates in a critical situation, those who give up when given the chance because there is a next year,' he said, lip curling in derision, 'and let their minds sway over an uncertain future, fools who barely carry determination like that don't deserve to be Chuunin.'

Her eyes narrowed. She wouldn't let some guilt-striking words make her forget that she had a job to do. The family came before the team, and came before being a shinobi.

'So what I am saying is that those of you who chose to remain gave the right answer to the tenth question. You can deal with the difficulties you will face. You have broken through the entrance. The First Exam of the Chuunin Selection ends now. I wish you luck.'

Naruto exploded out of his chair with a cry of joy, and Raiku fought to urge to lunge out of her own to strangle her teammate.

A window exploded. Despite her overpowering urge to absolutely destroy her teammate, Raiku looked up. With a fluid movement a large dark red piece of fabric was suspended by kunai between floor and ceiling, white writing scrawled across it.

'Everyone!' the pretty, purple haired woman who'd so abruptly arrived exclaimed, seemingly at ease despite only wearing a mesh shirt and undone jacket on her torso and shin guards and short skirt on her lower half. 'Now is no time to be happy!'

'"Second Examiner Mitarashi Anko is here"…?' Raiku read on the fabric with a dubious expression. 'I am the Second Examiner Mitarashi Anko!' the woman announced, as though it wasn't emblazoned behind her. 'Let's go to the next exam! Follow me!' Anko yelled, punching the air.

Stunned silence.

Ibiki took a half-step from out behind the fabric. 'Grasp the atmosphere,' he instructed Anko, deadpan.

Anko flushed, shooting him a glare before glancing out at the shocked Genin. 'Eighty one?' she asked, shooting him another, more questioning look. 'Ibiki, you let twenty seven teams pass? The First Exam must have been too soft!'

Ibiki was unfazed. 'It looks like there are a lot of excellent students this time.'

Anko snorted. 'Well, I'm going to make more than half of the teams fail in the Second Exam!' She smirked. 'I'm getting quite excited. I'll explain the details tomorrow. We'll go somewhere else, so ask your Jounin leader about the rally point and time. That is all- dismissed!'

Instantly Naruto led the way out to meet the assorted Jounin teachers, the Genin piling haphazardly towards the exit. Raiku sighed and stood, stretching her arms above her head. 'C'mon,' Ryuu said, jerking his head towards the doors.

'Coming,' she nodded. She blinked when her foot stuck to the floor. She looked down to see sand piled up around the offending appendage, and growled. 'Sand! Again with the sand!' she muttered under her breath, crouching to brush some of it off and only mildly surprised when it didn't move.

'Come on, toaster!' Daisukenojo called impatiently from the door. She straightened and waved dismissively.

'I'll catch up!'

She looked around as her teammates vanished from view, convinced this was some sort of malicious trick. Her eyes fell on the impatient Sand-nin who had been so questioning earlier, leaning against the desk with a large, strange black contraption on her back. She was staring at her with narrowed eyes, identical ones doing the same set in the purple-painted face next to her. The Sand-nin with purple markings was wearing a curiously feline hat and loose bodysuit, and seated next to them was…

She tilted her head. 'Mystery-nin?' she mumbled under her breath, squinting to see him better. There was no question it was him, of course, but she was so desperate to be wrong that she double-checked before saying anything. She brightened with genuine pleasure, relieved that the trick was being done to catch her attention. Or that's what she sincerely hoped it was for.

She sent him a cheerful wave. 'Hey! It's good to see you again!'

The boy in the cat hat crossed his arms across his chest, narrowing his eyes even further. She rallied her enthusiasm with herculean effort. 'Are you going to tell me your name this time?' she asked curiously.

'Gaara… do you know this girl?' the girl asked, giving her a cold stare.

Raiku winced, and the cat hat boy smirked at her discomfort. She couldn't quite understand why he was keeping her here if he wasn't going to talk to her. The boy with the blank green eyes looked at her for a while. 'You survived the trip through the storm,' his purple-y companion said, voice flippant. 'How?' It was a demand, not a real inquiry.

She shrugged. 'We used our skills to our advantage, I guess. We argue a lot, but we're actually a pretty good team,' she said modestly.

The sand tightened around her ankle, and she flinched when it seeped inside the wrappings to touch her skin to melt into glass.

The red-haired boy tilted his head, narrowing blackened eyes.

'Let's go, Kankuro, Gaara,' the girl sniffed, dismissing her with a flick of her head. Raiku felt her blood surge, unbidden, hair rising to float free of gravity.

'Gairano,' Ibiki muttered from the front of the classroom.

Of course he would know, she reprimanded herself for her surprise. He wouldn't tolerate a secret, even a Gairano one. She looked at him over her shoulder and nodded in understanding, forcing it back inside her skin and raising a hand to smooth her hair down as much as it would allow her.

She gave a tense bow. 'It was nice to see you again, Sand-nin,' she said tersely, trying in vain to get herself to relax. 'I'm sorry you didn't like my answers to your questions. I hope to be able to speak with you in a setting I won't be made fun of in.'

With a firm stamp of her free foot the sand turned to transparent sludge, allowing her to make her triumphant, if slightly gooey way outside.


	16. head trauma

'You aren't very good at this "failing" thing, huh,' her father said conversationally, casually cleaning out his nails with a kunai as he sat on the grass in the light of the setting sun.

She shook her head frantically.

'You know you'll have to fail the next round?' he asked lightly, flicking a leaf off his leg, listening to the pleasant sound of water flowing in the river he sat next to.

She nodded furiously.

He smiled as the water reflected the setting sun and the breeze gently tousled his hair, completely the picture of serenity.

Well, what would have been a picture of serenity if Raiku hadn't been tied up and then tied to dangle by her feet from a sturdy tree branch above the river. She struggled furiously against her bonds, rubbing her skin raw through the fabric as it chafed against her clothes, resembling nothing more than a fish wriggling on a hook.

'So we understand each other?' he asked, looking up at her at last, smiling warmly. Her father and the Equaliser next to him.

Securely gagged, she nodded helplessly. He hadn't waited for her to explain why she'd failed and he hadn't waited for her to tell him she'd have another chance. The family was angry. A strong burst of wind made her sway ominously on the rope, and she screwed her eyes shut. She could picture it now: the sudden burst of power as everything in the river was treated to an impromptu frying, the warm water filling her lungs as she tried desperately to inhale and stinging her eyes as she tried to see, buffeted down the river like a leaf in the wind to land where she may, sending electric destruction both before and behind her…

The Equaliser sent the kunai flashing through the air to sever the rope holding her up as her father walked away. She gave a muffled scream and thudded onto the riverbank headfirst, sending a sharp jolt of agony from the top of her skull down her spine. The water flowed quickly only inches from her face, that pathological, programmed terror she faced when confronted with the liquid rising to choke her. A distant crash echoed in her ears, fire spreading down her back and through her limbs, surging to the surface of her skin while her ears rang and the pain threatened to steal her vision completely.

'Happy birthday,' the Equaliser added, muffled by the ink-black mask. He turned on his heel and strode back towards the compound. She wriggled her way free of the restraints on her arms, yanking down the gag and glaring after him as she shoved the burn down, with the pain and indignation to somewhere it couldn't bother her.

'Thanks,' she muttered, one dazed, dilated pupil sparking more than it should have.

 

 

 

 

 

'Why the hell didn't you  _tell_  us it was your birthday yesterday!?' Daisukenojo hissed without any sort of discretion and a jab to her ribs as the Genin waited in front of the monstrously large forest for the Examiner.

She kept her eyes fixed firmly on the trees in front of them and didn't respond. The smallest part of their smallest root would still be bigger than her. Ancient moss coated the colossal figures, the canopy so thick and lush that they could barely make out a tree beyond the ones immediately behind the heavily reinforced fence guarding the territory. The leaves left the tops of the trees overshadowed and the gaps between branches ominously dark and impenetrable, unstirred by the breeze.

'I-it was your b-birthday yesterday, Raiku?' Hinata asked timidly from behind them.

'Yes,' she answered, not shifting her gaze.

'I-it's a shame… that you had t-to spend it in that exam,' the quiet Hyuuga said softly.

Frankly Raiku was more worried about the concussion. The pain and intense headache had left her in… the first bad mood she had ever, in her entire life, been in.

And it was a bad one. The burn was sweeping through her whenever she didn't actively focus on it, and the exertion was making her head spin and her ears ring. It was enraging, the thought of having so little self-control after one measly hit on the head.

'I don't really care about my birthday,' she said stiffly, forcing her ire down, the irrationality spurred by the odd tightness in her chest.

'What the hell are you talking about?' Kiba asked, slinging an arm around her tense shoulders. 'You turned thirteen, right? You're finally a teenager and you don't give a damn?'

'No,' she said, shrugging his arm off.

Ryuu's eyes carefully scanned her face, his expression shrewd. '"Electrical malfunction",' he echoed for the second time.

She nodded again, swallowing in feigned pain. Her mother's death wasn't something that her family cared about, and therefore she didn't either. She couldn't mourn a stranger and she'd never noticed her absence. But her family hated birthdays too, since on birthdays the level of Trauma risk skyrocketed, so she'd simply never celebrated one. Her mother's death gave her an excuse, which she cashed in on now.

'What?' Daisukenojo asked, he and the other Rookie Genin giving Ryuu weird looks at the unexplained but inexplicably confirmed assumption.

Ryuu rolled his eyes, shooting him a glare. 'Electrical malfunction?' he said, jabbing him. 'Hospital, birthday?'

Daisukenojo's look remained uncomprehending. Ryuu growled under his breath.

'Her mother  _died_  the day she was born, moron!' he hissed. 'Her birthday's the anniversary of her death!'

Daisukenojo scowled. 'Hey, don't call me a- oh.' He shrunk back, casting her a wary look. 'Oh.' The words "electrical malfunction" flashed into his mind. He swallowed hard. 'Oh,' he repeated.

'Well why the hell didn't you say so?' Kiba asked, patting her awkwardly on the shoulder. 'You could've said you didn't want to talk about it.'

'It's fine,' she gritted out. ' _I'm_  fine.' The fierce, hot ache hit her in the chest. Ruthlessly quashed yet again, it settled to a dull twinge.

'You don't seem fine,' Daisukenojo pointed out.

She narrowed her unnatural eyes at the forest in front of her and said nothing. Getting the hint, Kiba raised his hands and backed off. Hinata dropped her gaze, flushing in guilt and embarrassment. Clearly, she thought, Raiku was in pain.

'Shorty,' Yamada interrupted from behind the Genin group as Daisukenojo opened his mouth to speak. 'Leave it,' he said warningly, eyes flicking pointedly to Raiku's hands. Daisukenojo closed his mouth, eyes skimming down her arms to see her fists clenched and shaking, sparks jumping between the fine stitching on the leather and burning.

She'd only wanted to leave the exam and do her job. She wanted to be free of this damn Plot and to live a normal life. She didn't want to be murdered by Equalisers or strung up by her father above a river and set crashing headfirst onto the rocky riverbank. For the first time she was feeling… As though she'd been unfairly treated. Her blood pounded in her ears. At last she realised: she felt… Angry.

Very, very angry. She shoved it down yet again and smiled. Cheerful… now was the time to be cheerful.

'Raiku!' a familiar, sickeningly cheerful voice exclaimed. She found herself spun around and seized by the shoulders, staring in bewilderment into the tearful face of Rock Lee. 'Your bravery is so inspiring!'

'What?' she asked incredulously. She was unheard.

'Despite the pain of your mother's death-,' yes, there go the curious gazes. She closed her eyes wearily to avoid the stares of  _every single person present_. '-and the subsequent sapping of joy from every birthday you had since then, you valiantly persevere-,'

'It's not like that,' she interrupted, immediately derailing his train of praise. He jerked back in surprise, blinking owlishly.

'Raiku?'

She opened her eyes, looking up at him, eyebrow twitching in aggravation. 'I said it's not like that,' she repeated. 'Mourning is just selfish.'

'…Selfish?' he echoed dumbly.

Her eyes narrowed, gaze falling on the ground. 'Mourning is wishing that someone would be with  _you_ , that  _you_ would have them there for  _your_  purposes,' she muttered, the leather of her gloves threatening to rip in her tightening grip. 'Mourning is  _selfish_.'

Rock Lee blinked at her, hands releasing her shoulders uncertainly. 'Raiku…' he repeated quietly, staring at her. She took a deep breath, calming herself.

'Yesterday was my birthday and today it's not. I don't mind- really,' she said, creasing her eyes and smiling up at him. 'It's just another day. I'm sorry I said that, but I'm really nervous about the exam. It's…' she gave a self-depreciating laugh, rubbing the back of her neck. 'Really embarrassing to react like that. Forgive me?'

She knew she should snap out of it. She knew what she was doing was because the Plot was getting its grip on her, but if, as the family had told her, she was trapped in it already, what was the point? She felt multiple gazes resting on her, felt them relax at her confirmation of what they'd already suspected.

She was a Rookie – her nervousness was expected.

On her part, she just had to fail. Once she failed, she'd be out of the Plot forever. Then this anger would go away. This sense of injustice would vanish and the images would stop haunting her. The image of Mura's face and a man sitting alone. The image of a shinobi who had no one and never would. The sight of the ground rushing up to meet her for a mistake she hadn't been able to prevent.

She shook her head, closing her eyes as Rock Lee happily accepted her apology. Ryuu and Daisukenojo suspected they knew why she was upset. They thought she was upset because she thought she was a murderer. That wasn't true either. She wanted to tell them that being a murderer didn't matter to her because every shinobi became one in the end; she wanted to tell them that it didn't bother her. But she couldn't do it. Doing it meant that she would have to acknowledge that that wasn't the problem, doing it meant having to face that something else might be wrong.

The ground shook in a familiar way. Uzumaki had arrived.

'Whoa,' she heard him breathe out. 'What is this place?'

A low, feminine chuckle interrupted any answer someone may have provided her with. 'You're going to be able to experience why this is called the "Forest of Death",' Mitarashi Anko grinned maliciously, setting her hands on her hips in front of the wire fence surrounding the forest.

Naruto snorted, wiggling in an effeminate way. '"Today you're going to experience why this is called the Forest of Death,"' he imitated flamboyantly. 'There's no point in trying to scare us like that!' he exclaimed, giving her a challenging grin. 'I'm not scared at all!'

Raiku raised her hand to her chest, tightening the glove and fisting her fingers. No point at all, she echoed sarcastically, looking up at the forest of doom. She allowed the heat to warm her frightened limbs this time.

Anko tilted her head, smiling sweetly. In saccharine tones, she addressed Naruto. 'Really? You sure are energetic.'

A muscle in her eyebrow twitched. Almost before Raiku could narrow her own eyes in suspicion a kunai slid out of Anko's sleeve into her hand and was sent whizzing past Naruto's ear, thudding into the ground next to an unfazed Genin.

Anko came to a halt behind Naruto, pressing close to him. 'Boys like you die the fastest,' she murmured into his ear as blood started to slide down his face. Raiku raised her eyebrows when Anko raised her hands to cradle either side of the boy's face, expression delighted. She murmured something to him Raiku couldn't catch, deeply unsettling Naruto from the looks of it. She half-turned with a kunai at the ready as the Genin she had narrowly missed appear behind her-

The Genin held her discarded kunai in a freakishly extended tongue, somehow managing to speak with ease around it. 'Here's your knife,' they offered.

'Thank you,' Anko said, smiling pleasantly. 'But don't stand behind me like that- that is,' she added, the warning signs around her mouth and eyes appearing. 'Unless you want to die young.' She took the kunai without a hint of disgust and the tongue withdrew into the Genin's mouth, that androgynous face remaining expressionless.

'Well,' the Genin said eventually, voice implying him to be a woman even as his speech gave him away as a man. 'I get itchy when I see blood. Also… my precious hair was cut, so I got a bit excited.'

The Plot was the same as Yakushi's; Raiku half-turned to see the man better. 'Naruto,' Hinata said in quiet concern, hands clasped to her chest. It was understandable. Naruto was in a very, very tense situation and was famous for letting his mouth dominate where his head was supposed to reign.

Luckily, the almost androgynous man turned and casually threw an apology over his shoulder, walking away and narrowly missing bumping into Sakura.

Raiku only half-listened to the explanation of the exam.

Despite her best efforts, something ugly swelled under her skin.

 

 

 

 

 

'Alright,' Ryuu said quietly as the three of them crouched in a triangle on a high branch, deep into the darkness of the forest. Raiku's bare hand provided very dim illumination, fist clenched to keep the power at a discreet minimum. With a stick, he drew the circle of the forest in the quietly crackling light. 'Somewhere in this forest there are twenty six other teams. Each has a scroll. One more scroll has been hidden somewhere in here, a heaven scroll. That kind is the sort we need.'

He paused, fingers halting over his rough map. 'So the question,' he said, eyes flicking up to look at her and Daisukenojo. 'Is what approach we want to take. Finding the hidden scroll will be incredibly hard, but fighting the other teams has a higher risk of death.'

'I want to find the hidden scroll,' she said quietly, because she wanted the opposite.

Daisukenojo snorted. 'Are you kidding me? Chicken like always. We're tougher than these other teams. I vote we fight for the other scroll.' He glanced up at Ryuu. 'Your vote decides.'

Ryuu was looking Raiku, who was looking at the map. 'Why?' he asked.

Daisukenojo frowned. 'Because we can beat them,' he said slowly, as though talking to a particularly stupid child.

Ryuu shook his head. 'Not you. You explained already.' He jerked his head at Raiku. 'Your turn to explain.'

Raiku tilted her head slightly. 'I think,' she said slowly, hesitantly. 'That there is… something wrong with me.' She faltered, reluctant to say much more. 'I think,' she continued, forcing the words out. 'That if I fight… I won't be able to stop.'

The silence was filled by the gentle crackling of her hand. 'God, toaster, why didn't you say anything?' Daisukenojo frowned, running a hand through the red stubble that his haircut had left him with. 'You going psycho is something you shoulda mentioned.'

'I thought I could fix it before the exam,' she muttered. 'I didn't want to  _have_  to mention it.'

Ryuu didn't comment. 'If that's the case, think of what we have to do to find the hidden scroll,' he decided, moving the stick to gesture at the area. 'This Examiner is sly. She'd pick something that would make us frustrated for not guessing.'

'Each scroll has a very small chakra signature,' Daisukenojo noted, surprising them both. 'I can sense the one we've got right now. It's really, really faint,' he added at their questioning looks. 'You can only get a read on it when you're pretty close.'

'How close?' Ryuu murmured. Daisukenojo considered.

'I could sense the one she had in her hand,' he said eventually, and Raiku was once again surprised by the instantaneous transformation into the professional. 'So a little over ten metres is the furthest I can be to sense it.'

Ryuu frowned. 'We can't afford to scan the area that way. There's a third axis to worry about when in a forest, and it may be buried.'

'I can lap the entire place easily,' Raiku said quietly. 'But I can't carry anyone. Not without…' she trailed off, averting her eyes.

'You can't keep it to a minimum?' Ryuu pressed. She shook her head.

'That's the problem right now. The risk is too high even normally to try it.'

'I guessed as much. Daisukenojo, is there any way to help Raiku be able to pick it up on her own?'

Daisukenojo snorted. 'You want me to create a technique that'll pick up signatures for her, in a forest with twenty six hostile teams, all carrying scrolls?'

'Let me worry about the teams,' he said grimly. 'Can you do it?'

Daisukenojo shifted his weight back onto his heels, considering. 'I might,' he said eventually. 'But we can't rely on it. A technique usually takes months to make, not less than five days.'

Ryuu nodded. 'In that case, the obvious solution is the alternative,' he said quietly. 'We take a scroll from another team.'

She nodded slowly. 'Then I suppose…' she said after a while. 'We'd better try and get an idea of where they all are anyway.'

Ryuu looked at her carefully, drumming his fingers on the stick. 'Can you do it without losing control?'

'I don't have control,' she snorted. 'Ever.' She tapped her mask meaningfully.

'That explains a lot.' Daisukenojo rubbed his head again, dark eyes deep in thought. 'I can sense six teams within five kilometres. I can't tell which scrolls they have… obviously. But two are Rookie teams, and one of the other's that lovely Sound team Raiku had the decency to get good and pissed off at us.'

'Maybe if I kill them I'll feel better?' she offered mildly.

'We'll think about it,' both responded.

'That means no,' she said sullenly, folding her arms across her chest.

'It means we'll think about it,' Ryuu said sternly, flicking her in the nose reprovingly. He straightened with a soft exhalation, stretching his arms over his head. Glumly, she noticed he'd had another growth spurt, now standing head and shoulders above her and lean with it, possessing the perfect musculature of a stealth shinobi. Daisukenojo was almost at her height and heavily built for his age, wearing the physical benefit of Yamada's training.

They were growing and growing older, and she was the same, she noticed in surprise. She was still exactly one hundred and sixty centimetres tall, and thin as a rail. She was much stronger but the vague outline of herself she saw in mirrors still resembled a long-limbed black spider. Skinny and curling in the light to try and disappear.

She viciously shoved the thought away. She was trapped in an Angst line. It was the only explanation and she  _would not stand for it_. She smiled to her team, giving them a thumbs-up. 'We can do this!'

'She's happy suddenly,' Daisukenojo sighed in exasperation, cuffing her over the back of her head. He straightened, yanking her up to stand as well. 'I suppose we should be glad?'

Ryuu's eyes gave her a cursory once-over. 'It's her defence mechanism. Ignore it.'

She sagged. 'Aw.'

'Quiet,' he ordered. He ran a hand through his hair and adjusted his forehead protector. 'Let's go rob someone.'

He couldn't repress the smirk that spread across his face as behind him, his teammates grinned.


	17. exotic insects and hunting

It was less than thirty minutes into the exams that the explosions began. Raiku was surprised, in truth.

She didn't think it would take that long.

Darting through the trees at breakneck speeds, Ryuu gave a sharp whistle from somewhere to their far left. Daisukenojo jumped to intercept from the ground, while she remained in the canopy, planting her feet firmly on the branch she had been about to step off.

She tilted her head curiously as another Raiku followed, darting through the trees below her. So it was beginning? She was glad, in truth. They'd set up the system to make it easy for anyone to interfere, more specifically to impersonate her.

She was the hardest to imitate, for obvious reasons.

However, if this team member was cocky enough to impersonate her they would have left a teammate behind to make sure she didn't interfere. Raiku smiled to herself. They wouldn't send their scroll bearer directly into the hands of the enemy and they wouldn't send them after her. She just had to destroy the one after her badly enough that the third decided to intervene. Ryuu and Daisukenojo would keep the fake with them long enough to trick her into thinking that she'd succeeded, at which point they would find Raiku and trade the imposter for the real one. That left only the scroll bearer to deal with when they finally decided to show themselves.

That being said she sat firmly down into a cross-legged position on the massive, moss covered tree branch and started whistling to herself, fishing from her pocket and making adjustments to a long, razor sharp wire.

 

 

 

 

 

'Ryuu, what's going on?' Raiku asked, rubbing the back of her head tiredly and stifling a yawn, landing lightly in the sun dappled clearing he had called them to. 'I thought we were going to find another team.'

Ryuu didn't look at her, readjusting his sandal as he crouched in the middle of the clearing, hair ruffled by the breeze. 'We are,' he said shortly.

'I don't see one,' Daisukenojo drawled, sticking his hands in his pockets, squinting as the sun hit his eyes. It was hard to adjust after the almost pitch-black of the forest, but he didn't have to worry in his current setting.

'Team Gai is nearby,' Ryuu said, straightening. 'You said they have the same scroll as us.'

'Well yeah,' the redhead shrugged. 'But I don't see any reason to team up with them.'

'We're not going to,' Ryuu explained. 'We're going to follow them and then take the scroll they're almost guaranteed to find before we do.'

'You're a sneaky bastard and it works. Raiku, you ready?' Daisukenojo asked, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. She creased her eyes, nodding.

'No problem!'

'Oh but wait!' Daisukenojo said sarcastically. 'I forgot that there  _is_  a problem! How does this sound? Team Gai  _hates_  us. Or hates you, really,' he said to Raiku.

'Me?' she asked, pointing to herself in that strangely habitual way.

'No, I meant the other Raiku. Of course you!' he snapped.

She set her hands on her hips. 'But Rock Lee likes me!'

'Yeah, but isn't it a shame about Hyuuga? You know, the guy who  _leads the team_?!'

She glared at him. 'It's not that bad!'

Ryuu paused and Daisukenojo smirked. Raiku stepped back, instantly on edge. 'Let's go,' Ryuu said firmly, turning on his heel. 'We need to approach slowly, or they'll put their guards up.'

'Didn't… Didn't you have a problem with this plan?' Raiku asked Daisukenojo, raising an eyebrow.

He shrugged. 'He's the boss.'

She didn't notice how keenly he watched her when she responded. 'Sure,' she sighed.

'It's going to be nightfall soon, so they may try to get the drop on us,' Ryuu added as they walked. 'Teams Kakashi and… Raiku's friends are also nearby.'

'I can't sense anything,' Daisukenojo frowned. His brow creased, deep in concentration. 'Not unless I strain. And I know damn well you aren't better at that than me.'

'A birdie told me,' Ryuu said, ducking under a low, lichen covered branch. They settled into silence for a while as they walked, making slow progress.

'Don't even think about trying to get me to try and sense the scrolls from here, bastard,' Daisukenojo warned when the idea occurred to him, jumping nimbly over a protruding tree root easily twice his size.

'And you mentioned… My friend?' Raiku ventured cautiously.

Ryuu tilted his head slightly, eyes fixed on some unseen point in the distance. 'Sound-nin that we beat the crap out of.'

'Ah.' She nodded, falling silent.

'Reckon she'll be alright? The girl in Team Kakashi,' Daisukenojo asked after a while, deep in thought. 'She didn't seem like she particularly wanted to be here.'

'She'll be fine,' Ryuu answered. He frowned suddenly. 'Team Gai's moving out. My guess is to scout for other teams.'

Raiku smiled faintly.

'Good.'

 

 

 

 

 

'Now,' Raiku sighed theatrically, sitting back on the branch and using her hands to support her. One leg bent and the other ankle resting on her bent knee, she jigged her raised foot carelessly. 'You're not very good at this stealth thing, are you?'

She was beginning to see why her father liked being in charge of the family. This was  _amazing_.

The bound figure was wriggling like a worm on a hook, ankles tied together and wrists tied behind their back. Wire bound their arms completely to them, and the black cloth gag forced between their teeth couldn't hide the horrible burns on their face.

They glared at her.

'Right now,' she said, lifting a hand to look at her bared fingernails, studiously ignoring the burns in the shapes of handprints on the boy's body. 'Your teammate is travelling with my team. You thought you'd replace me because it's easy to impersonate a wimp.' She inclined her head in acknowledgement, even if it was a little self-deprecating. 'That's true. Very soon I'm going to sever the cord holding you to that tree branch. You're going to die, probably, I'm not quite sure. But that  _should_  teach you not to try and rip the clothes off underage girls.'

It had been a harsh lesson. A lucky one, for her, since he had genuinely taken her by surprise. Only the initial surge of electricity from her skin had kept her alive and kept him down until she could tie him up.

But now she got to look like it was on purpose.

The boy had paled and tried to shake his head when he heard of her plans, then nodded in agreement.

She blinked. 'You think you've already learnt?'

He nodded again, desperately. His eyes were wide and imploring.

She sighed again. 'I believe you.'

He sagged with relief when she stood, stretching her long, thin arms over her head.

'But!' she added brightly, putting her hands on her hips. She creased her eyes at him in a smile. 'That doesn't change the fact that you ripped my sleeves!'

She stepped closer to him, bringing his upside down face to eye level, and glowed slightly.

The boy closed his eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

Dawn found Raiku clinging to the underside of a tree branch, electric blue eyes glowing brightly in the dark like some strange, exotic insect. Which was, she reflected, eyes firmly fixed on the figures of Team Asuma, a great improvement from a spider. The three Rookie Genin were slumped in a relatively clear patch of ground, the noisy blonde slumped against a tree branch.

'How are we going to get scrolls if we keep running away, Shikamaru?' the blonde asked in tones perilously close to a whine. Raiku raised an eyebrow and leaped silently for another branch, chakra-laden fingertips and toes keeping her easily suspended. Courtesy of Daisukenojo, this skill required no chakra of her own to use.

'Avoiding troublesome shinobi is our best option for the first few days. After that the weaker teams will be worn down and easy pickings,' the brunette sighed, expression deadpan, as per usual. Raiku noted his hair was almost as spiky as hers, grinning slightly and adding an upwards tilt to the disembodied, glowing blue eyes.

'Hey… Shikamaru,' the fat one asked slowly, reaching for a bag of potato chips he appeared to have perpetually attached to him. 'Would Hyuuga be considered troublesome?'

'Which Hyuuga?' Shikamaru yawned.

'Neji,' the fat one answered, casually munching on a chip.

'Hide!' the blonde hissed, lunging to her feet and leaping over the bushes closest to Raiku to crouch. Shikamaru instantly slid down next to her, narrowly avoiding the fat one's leg colliding with his head as he too followed them, crouching behind the bush, backs to the clearing they had previously occupied.

This brought the fat one about a metre from Raiku's floating, blowing blue gaze. For a moment his eyes squinted blindly into the dark, senses apparently entirely occupied with focusing on where he feared Hyuuga might be approaching. Raiku tilted her darkness-shrouded head slightly, grinning. This was perfect! She was a coward and thus, made for stealth! How had she never thought of this before!?

The flush of heat brought on by her encounter the day before began to ebb, appeased at the idea of at the very least frightening them. She didn't force it away just yet- it gave her reflexes an unexpected boost and she was actually sort of glad it was there.

While she burned, she wasn't afraid, which was a nice change. A great deal of her cowardice was exaggerated, but it wasn't appropriate in this setting.

Well, exaggerated wasn't the right word.

Alright, it was all real, she admitted to herself grudgingly. But right now she was enjoying her stealth.

She widened her eyes, tilting her head with deliberately owlish movement as Neji stepped into the clearing behind the three.

The fat one's gaze finally locked on hers, attracted by the movement. All the colour vanished from his face, she noted with glee. He pointed at what to him looked like a pair of floating ghostly eyes, opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

Was this why her teammates liked picking on her? Because she could hardly blame them.

Neji came to a stop, turning to look in the direction of the three (four) hiding Genin. 'Stop hiding and come out,' he instructed.

'…Ghost…' the fat one managed to whimper, finger shaking. He saw the eyes narrow. He was ignored.

'But we hid as fast as we could!' the blonde whispered.

'What a troublesome one found us,' Shikamaru muttered to them, yet again ignoring the utter terror on the fat one's face.

'Plan Number One – hide and run failed!' the blonde said in a whisper to him, turning her head away from their petrified, pudgy teammate. 'Now we have to execute Plan Number Two!'

She could insert capitals into sentences too. Raiku smiled.

'It'll work for sure,' she said firmly.

Shikamaru sighed, grimacing. 'I don't mind.'

The fat one's resolve snapped and he jumped to his feet, barrelling past his teammates so quickly t ground shook under his feet. 'Ghost!' he cried.

'Chouji!' the blonde exclaimed, leaping to her feet alongside Shikamaru to follow. 'Chouji, what are y- Hyuuga Neji!' she remembered, laughing nervously, caught in an act of frustration and trying to look innocent. She turned slowly towards him, and her sudden pose put Raiku in mind of a fangirl. The wire attached to her gloved fingers tugged gently, and she gave a brief, savage yank in return.

It didn't move again.

Neji turned, giving them a thoroughly unimpressed look.

The blonde valiantly continued on as Shikamaru stood over their prone teammate, currently curled into a foetal position. 'How lucky to meet last year's Number One Rookie Genin, Neji, here!'

Neji tilted his head slightly. 'Oh. It's just you there.'

The blonde suddenly reached up to adjust her ponytail, body language coy. Raiku stared, inching closer. No… That  _couldn't_  be the plan…

The hair band came out, letting blonde hair spill attractively over the girl's shoulder as she winked flirtatiously. Raiku almost choked in shock. 'I've always wanted to see you, just once,' she cooed.

Neji's expression didn't change as he turned his back, taking a few steps away. 'Begone.'

The blonde looked scandalised, face flushing with anger. Raiku's grin resurfaced.  _Awesome_.

The blonde began to rage at Neji's retreating back and her teammates , expression livid. She punched the air towards him, resulting in his immediate stillness.

'You're pointing your fists at me… Does that mean you want to fight?' he asked coolly. The blonde stumbled back, rage vanishing.

'No! Not at all!' she exclaimed, raising her hands in a gesture of placation.

Neji exhaled sharply in annoyance, turning his head slightly to look over his shoulder. 'Then begone. Even if I take a scroll from cowards like you, I'll just become the laughing stock of the village.'

Without even waiting for him to finish, the three ran back to the bush. Coincidentally towards the by now long-forgotten 'ghost', but she was of course gone by then.

Neji made a derisive sound under his breath. 'They're like cockroaches.'

'Alright!' the blonde said, laughing in a brittle, high pitched tone that hurt Raiku's ears as she crouched above them. 'Let's go find some weak people!'

'There's no one weaker than us,' Shikamaru grumbled.

'Don't be stupid, Shikamaru!' the blonde said, making a fist. 'Team Yamada and Team Kakashi!'

Raiku was quietly offended, lightly balanced on a branch somewhere above their heads. She sank back onto fingertips and toes when Neji paused again, quietly despising his bloodline limit. 'When I said "stop hiding",' Neji said, raising his voice slightly. Team Asuma beat an even hastier retreat, quickly vanishing from sight. 'I meant you too… Gairano.' He turned his head to look at her directly, eyes narrowed.

The pale morning light failed to hide her black clad form, and she simply waved at him cheerfully. 'Hello Hyuuga! I won't get in your way!' she smiled.

His sharp eyes caught the glint of the steadily improving light on a wire attached to her hand. 'A trap?' he muttered to himself.

'No!' she assured him hastily, waving her hands reassuringly. The wire jerked. 'No trap! Well,' she amended. 'It  _was_  a trap. But it's not one any more, since someone's already in it, so you don't need to worry!'

'Your team isn't here. What game are you playing?' he demanded, but she smiled when she noticed he wasn't yet in a defensive stance.

'I'm going to meet them now,' she nodded, giving him a casual salute and vanishing. Even Neji's eyes failed to trace her steps, but couldn't miss the blue that singed the branches she trod on. He glared at her back as she sped after Team Asuma, relatively confident that it would take her to her teammates.

* * *

Chouji sat on a branch and munched happily once Shikamaru had determined they'd run far enough, and searched long enough. Above him, unseen and mirroring him in pose and action, Raiku sat with her mask pooled around her neck and munched happily on a piece of beef jerky.

Yamanaka groaned, putting a hand on either side of her head in frustration. 'We can't find any weak-looking people at all!'

Raiku smiled to herself giddily, wriggling on the spot in barely contained glee.

Shikamaru sighed heavily, turning to face her with his arms folded across his chest. 'Actually, only Naruto's team and Team Yamada are probably weaker than us.'

For some reason this instantly inspired Yamanaka's ire, despite Shikamaru only repeating what she'd said earlier. 'Idiot!' she snarled. 'Do you know what you're saying!?'

'What?' he asked, expression flat.

'Naruto and Sakura may be weak, but they're with the super genius Sasuke!' she snapped.

He 'hmph'ed. 'I don't know about that. Geniuses can be quite fragile in real combat.'

She growled under her breath, a vein throbbing alarmingly in her forehead. Shikamaru sighed again. 'Fine, fine. I'm sorry that I upset you.'

'There's no way Sasuke can be defeated!' Yamanaka dismissed, flipping her hair over her shoulder dismissively. She snorted abruptly. 'Though Sakura can be!'

Chouji, previously happily silenced by the fruit he'd foraged, paused mid-chew and squinted into the distance. Raiku, teeth-deep in a piece of particularly uncooperative jerky, looked down at him curiously. She had a much better view from where she sat, but she was surprised he hadn't noticed until now.

'Hey!' he called down to Yamanaka and Shikamaru. 'Sasuke's on the ground! And Sakura's fighting,' he added as an afterthought.

'What did you say?' Yamanaka demanded, swiftly jumping up to stand on the branch next to him. She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted. Shikamaru jumped and crouched on Chouji's other side. Yamanaka gasped, catching sight of the scene.

Raiku supposed it was quite traumatic. Yamanaka wanted Sasuke as a Love Interest and he  _was_  pretty badly beaten and unconscious. And while her and Sakura were rivals, they appeared to be at least an idiosyncratic type of friend. She sighed, scratching her head. She didn't want to fight Team Asuma on her own, but she hadn't found Daisukenojo and Ryuu yet. Maybe the imposter had killed them?

She muffled a snort, taking another struggling bite of jerky.  _It would take more than a knife to kill that guy_ , she mused in amusement, trying to picture anyone catching Ryuu off guard, ever. And as he refused to be beaten by Ryuu, Daisukenojo would hardly fall prey to the traps that Ryuu would avoid.

Team Asuma moved forward and she moved with them, high and unseen.

 

 

 

 

 

Midday found her on a branch above Team Asuma still, watching the utter defeat of Rock Lee. 'But our moves are the speed of sound, and exceed yours,' the porcupine-nin stated, standing over Rock Lee as he sunk to his knees, panting.

The Plot tried to shove Raiku forward and off her branch, complete with pun about the speed of light. She clung to the wood obstinately. Granted, she didn't want Rock Lee to be hurt. But Rock Lee still had a Plot about him, and wouldn't be killed now. Fire ripped through her veins, tearing a pained gasp from her. Unbidden her hand rose to the level of her eyes, sparking dangerously as it turned into a fist. With the other she slammed it into the branch, ignoring the pain. She would  _never_  allow herself to fall victim to her own temper, she told herself firmly, eyes narrowed.  _Never_.

'I will teach you,' the porcupine-nin continued gloating. 'That there is a wall that you can't get past with just hard work.'

Lee dodged an attack and suffered the blowback. Raiku growled under her breath. Clearly he was from  _Sound_. Clearly the attack was  _vibrations_.  _The attack could not be any more obvious_. The porcupine-nin went on to explain.

'Your outdated moves won't work on us,' the smirking  _boy who trodden on her foot, the asshole_  taunted. 'It was effective for a while,' he smirked. 'Until I showed you my technique.'

 _What did you do- tread on him?_  Raiku's inner voice bitched. It occurred to her this was a lot of enmity to stem  _just_  from a slightly squished foot.

'So it's not going to go as smoothly as you thought,' the bastard said, pulling his fists out of the ground. 'I can control supersonic waves and air pressure. And I'm capable of destroying even a rock. I can send air into the ground and make it a cushion, also. It's different from your dumb moves.' He unfolded his hands to show Rock Lee and Sakura, and obviously what they saw was pretty upsetting.

Raiku was just a little annoyed that her gaze wasn't physically breaking the man in half. Her fist tightened around her wires and all that was attached, every second of their use a proud testament to Uncle Morino. She paused, as even her feeble chakra senses picked something up. There was a shift in the air and a change in the wind direction. Wind was not, as many had been led to believe through popular fiction, inclined to change direction on its own. She couldn't sense them, but that was a message clear as day sent by Ryuu that Daisukenojo had picked her up. She ignored the sounds of combat behind her in favour of stifling the surges of power and dampening her chakra signature, small as it was. She'd come to rely on her power and its ability to cloak her chakra, but in a dangerous situation like this it was foolish to not take active precautions. She adjusted the senbon that was holding her ripped sleeve in place, detaching it from her glove and letting it slide down her forearm, dragged by its own weight.

Raiku turned back to the scene in front of her to catch the porcupine-nin's upraised arm and Lee's prone form.

'I won't let you!' Sakura snarled, producing kunai out of nowhere.

Raiku blinked. That was… new. Spontaneous weapons generation?

She realised that the night deprived of sleep wasn't doing her any favours, and resolved to never do it again. The porcupine-nin raised his protected arm, easily deflecting the sharp projectiles.

That was precisely why Raiku preferred to use wires in everything she did. Even if it was blocked, BAM!

Live electric current.

'C'mon,' Chouji urged below, peering through the bushes along with his stunned teammates. 'Let's run away! They're dangerous!'

'Looks like Sasuke and Naruto are out of it,' Shikamaru mused thoughtfully, dark, serious eyes analysing the scene. 'But even Lee is getting beaten, and now it's just Sakura.' He turned to Yamanaka. 'What are you going to do, Ino?'

'What, you ask?' she responded distantly.

'Sakura's in danger. Is that okay with you?' Shikamaru pressed. 'You two were best friends, right?'

Raiku grinned, temporarily distracted by her approaching team and enemy. She'd been right! Ryuu was having a positive influence on her after all!

'Hey, Ino,' Shikamaru repeated when she didn't answer. 'What are we going to do?'

'I know we have to help, but we can't do anything! We can't just jump in there!' she snapped. Raiku, their ever-present shadow, rolled her eyes, using hand puppets to imitate their discourse in silent mockery. Right up until the girl Raiku had so lovingly electrocuted stepped in. She felt a strange surge of resentment, and wondered at her own suddenly volatile feelings.

'Your hair is glossier than mine,' the girl said, grasping Sakura's hair and hoisting her slightly off the ground. 'If you have time to care for your hair, train more!'

Alright.

So there were some things that she was in the right about.

But that didn't mean she liked her, or anything.

'Trying to be sexy?' she asked mockingly, giving Sakura's hair a particularly savage yank. She raised her voice. 'Zaku! Kill the Sasuke guy in front of this pig.'

The foot-squisher laughed. 'That sounds good.'

Sakura tried to move and found her hair almost ripped out of her head, berated by the Sound-nin holding onto her. 'Don't move!'

Something occurred to Raiku.

Maybe… she wondered in the beginnings of concern. The Plot…

Involved their deaths?

And so technically… helping them… wouldn't be a problem?

She squinted, desperately trying to rationalise the situation to her advantage.

'Then let's do this,' Zaku-foot-squisher snorted, walking casually in the direction of Sakura's fallen teammates.

'Sasuke and Naruto are in trouble!' Shikamaru hissed, starting forward in his own worry.

And then Sakura did something that Raiku found admirable enough to break the rules for. She managed, through her pain and the unwillingness of her joints, to bring her hand up and slice through her own hair, freeing herself.

Ino's jaw dropped.

Raiku tucked her hands into her armpits to avoid clapping. Sakura's forehead protector dropped to the ground with a clang.

'Kin, kill her!' Zaku shouted. Sakura's hand began to move in a series of seals, just as Kin slammed into her side. An explosion of smoke heralded the use of a replacement technique, leaving only a log.

Raiku idly wished for popcorn, concealed in the leaves about Team Asuma. Sakura darted towards Zaku from the right, unleashing kunai. As he raised his hands to use his own technique she used her own again, vanishing just in time as the air sent her kunai whizzing back towards her.

The next time she dropped in from above, hands already moving in a seal. 'I'm telling you,' Zaku yelled up to her, 'it's not going to work more than two or three times!'

Kunai pelted through the air towards her, and he instantly looked around for the next place of her attack. 'Now where'd she go?'

He paused as blood dropped onto his face.

Sakura, still approaching from above, readied her kunai and landed on him heavily. The kunai slammed into his arm as he tried to defend himself, her teeth embedding themselves readily in the other.

Raiku winced.

She just  _knew_  she'd have to interfere at this rate…

'Let go, damnit!' Zaku growled, struggling with Sakura furiously.

Porcupine made a move, and Ino- finally- made hers too.

Sakura looked up when the blow didn't come, eyes widening at the sight.

'Ino…' she whispered.

'I'm not going to let you take all the good parts in front of Sasuke!' Ino said, as her and her team stood between Sakura and certain death.

Raiku tilted her head quizzically. 'He's… he's unconscious,' she said faintly, incredulously. 'What?'

'What are you thinking!?' Chouji demanded of Shikamaru, currently holding part of the fat boy's scarf out as a barrier. 'These guys are way too dangerous!'

'It's troublesome, but we have to do this,' Shikamaru informed him. 'Since Ino revealed herself, we men can't just run away!'

Good old fashioned emasculation? Raiku wondered.

Ino giggled to herself. 'Sorry to get you two involved, but we're a three man team. We have to do everything together.'

Shikamaru was smirking. 'Oh well. Whatever happens, happens.'

'No!' Chouji wailed. 'I don't want to die yet!' he struggled to try and get away. 'Let go of my muffler!'

'Shut up! Stop moving!' Shikamaru growled.

Zaku gave a brief chuckle. 'Run if you want. Fatty.'

Chouji abruptly stopped moving.

'Hey,' he said in a tone far removed from his usual state of comic relief. 'What did that person say? I couldn't hear him too well.'

'I said,' Zaku repeated, raising his voice. 'You can go jack off in the woods if you want… you fat ass!'

Chouji remained still for one further moment, then spun around with an expression of utter rage. 'I'm not fat! I'm big boned!'

He struck an offensive stance, chakra rippling up around him. 'Hooray for big-boned people!'

Raiku looked at her thin limbs sadly.

'Okay! You two understand that this is a fight between Konoha and Sound, right!?' Chouji demanded, pointing at his teammates.

'Geez,' Shikamaru muttered. 'This is going to be troublesome.'

'That's our line,' Zaku corrected.

Kin took a step.

Raiku hummed to herself so quietly as to be inaudible to anyone else, fingers quietly moving over her wires.

Raiku wasn't strong. At all.

But she was very, very fast.

In an environment like this Raiku would always have the advantage, her speed and natural terror of being spotted and retaliated against making her incredibly stealthy. Who knew being a wimp could come in handy? she asked herself. Quietly praying she wouldn't be seen, naturally, but whatever worked. The wires wrapped around her fingers pulled sharply, leaving her running the risk of having her gloves cut through. These wires were more than strong enough to cut her actual fingers off, so she released all but her original trap. She was willing to help, after all, but only as long as it didn't endanger her.

Chouji's bulk expanded almost instantaneously, and his head and limbs vanished inside his clothes like some sort of turtle. He launched into the air and began to spin. 'Meat Tank!'

He hit the ground rolling, hurtling towards Zaku. 'What's this?' Zaku laughed. 'It's just a fat ass rolling!'

As suddenly comical as the situation was, Raiku felt obligated to look away as the wind became biting. Ryuu was giving the second warning. They were within a kilometre. She silently admired Daisukenojo's truly formidable knack with chakra. She could barely sense someone a hundred metres away.

She looked back to see porcupine-nin paralysed, possessed by a shadow stretching from Shikamaru's feet. The giant green ball was up in the air… she frowned. For… some reason. But she did think there was something naturally impressive about someone who could use their own shadow.

She quietly cheered Shikamaru on.

Who cared about Sasuke? He looked like a girl.

The green, rapidly spinning ball that was Chouji slammed into Zaku, sending him flying. Raiku sat back and enjoyed the show, no longer bothering to play with her wires.

'Dosu!' Kin demanded as the porcupine struck a dancer's pose. 'What are you doing!?' Her eyes fell on Shikamaru striking the same pose, widening in realisation. Shikamaru grinned mockingly.

'Ino, now it's up to you women,' Shikamaru said, further mocking the entrapped porcupine-nin by making cat ears with his hands.

'Okay Shikamaru,' Ino answered. 'Take care of my body.'

Now, Raiku was not unaware of what went on in some teams. But she didn't honestly see that one coming.

'Mind transfer technique!'

Oh. That explained it.

Ino's body fell against Shikamaru, instantly supported by her teammate. Dosu mimed the same action.

'Kin!' Zaku yelled, barely evading Chouji's attacks.

'What's wrong!?' Dosu demanded, still frozen in place.

Kin, to the surprise of no one but the other Sound-nin, raised a kunai to her own throat. 'This is it!' she said. 'If you move, this Kin girl is dead! If you don't want to retire here, leave your scroll and get out of here! Once you two back off far enough that I can't sense your chakra, I'll let this girl go!'

This provoked no response.

Kin growled. 'Chouji!'

The ball of Chouji went flying back down towards them at the same time Zaku raised his hand, intercepting the wind but still letting Kin's body slam into a tree with a hoarse cry.

'You took us too lightly.'

'Our purpose is not to get a scroll or to get through this exam. It's Sasuke.'

The Plot thickened. Raiku shifted uneasily, trying not to let it see her. She kicked it off the branch, shuddering.

Dosu was making it quite clear that Kin was expendable, finally freed from Shikamaru's Shadow Imitation.

'How disgusting,' Neji's voice interrupted the tension filled scene. Raiku looked up to see him and Tenten standing on a high tree branch. 'A mere minor Sound-nin… Acting like victors for beating those second class ninja?'

Raiku clutched her heart with one hand and the branch with the other. The suspense was killing her here.

'Lee!' Tenten said worriedly, eyes falling on her battered teammate.

'Looks like he screwed up,' Neji muttered.

'You guys just keep coming out like roaches!' Dosu called, and Raiku couldn't help but agree.

'That bobbed hair kid is on our team,' Neji informed him. Chakra flared to life with his Byakugan, making the veins on his temples swell. 'Looks like you went overboard with him!'

Raiku gave a low whistle as the fighters in the clearing visibly freaked out at the sight of the activated Byakugan. Neji stood, shoulders squared and one hand forming the seal to channel his chakra. 'If you're going to continue to fight, we will fight with everything we have.'

Dosu made a sound of contempt. 'If you don't like what we're doing, stop showing off and come down here!'

'No,' Neji denied. 'It seems like there's no need for me to do that.'

It was at this point Raiku settled back against the tree trunk, secure in the knowledge that this Drama-fest would continue on happily without her.

The wind toyed with her hair, carrying the smell of blood. Third sign. Nearing half a kilometre away, Ryuu would bite his own thumb, or something similar, and send the scent to her directly. First sign- wind change. Second sign- hard wind. Third sign- blood wind. Final sign- no wind.

They were travelling slowly. She guessed it was to stop the shinobi trailing them from losing them completely.

'Jeez, guys,' she muttered, rubbing the back of her head awkwardly. 'I could've been seriously hurt in the time you've spent toying with this guy!'

'Sasuke! You woke up!'

Raiku retched at the sudden, violent influx of Plot-corrupted chakra, hunching and holding her hand over her mouth. She'd never felt anything… Another wave hit her and she bit down on her lower lip to keep her mouth shut. In terms of practicality, a vomit-covered mask was one of the worst things she could provide herself with. She curled into a ball, allowing the electricity to come back to her skin and provide her with a gentle glow. The foreign impact of the chakra lessened as the soothing sensation of something far more natural to her surfaced.

She tried to force out a laugh.

Soothing… that was new. The heat vanished, evidently as cowardly at heart as she was. She was out of her league, here.


	18. everybody hates Ryuu

The Rookie and non-Rookie teams remained in the clearing in the aftermath, luckily. Raiku had every intention of staying on the tail of Team Asuma, and this large gathering just made it easier to ascertain who had what scrolls.

'Hey, Sakura!' Ino called to her from across the clearing, waving. 'Over here! I'll fix your hair!'

Raiku, much recovered, sat cross-legged on the tree branch with a faint glow and look of deep suspicion. She didn't like this new ability of Sasuke's. The Plot was suspicious and the Chakra was too pointed. This … was trouble.

The wind abruptly died, earning a sigh from Chouji. 'The breeze was nice while it lasted,' he said, rubbing his forehead woefully.

Final sign.

They couldn't be far away now. She wondered if the already aggravated teams would attack Ryuu and Daisukenojo, and decided they deserved it. She'd been skulking around for  _two days_ …

'Don't kill me?' someone offered fearfully. Raiku flinched, shuddering at the sound of her own voice. Or, at least an imitation of her own voice. Fake Raiku stepped out of the trees with her hands up in the universal gesture of harmlessness, carefully treading closer to the others.

'Raiku?' Lee blinked, half-rising and easily shoved back down by Tenten. 'What are you doing here?'

Sasuke glared at the girl. 'It's probably a trap- don't be fooled.'

'No! No trap!' the Fake Raiku said hastily. She tried to move one of her raised hands to scratch the back of her head and froze, instantly aware of the numerous weapons pointed at her. 'My… My team and I are moving through the area,' she said cautiously, eyes flicking over the other Genin. 'And they wanted to let you know they weren't hostile… So they sent me, since I've spoken to more of you than they have?'

She ended on a high note, unsure of herself.

Raiku drummed her fingertips on the branch, glowering. They couldn't think this was her! She was… was all wrong! Her eyes were too pale, she was wearing black …  _somethings_  instead of wrappings around her shins and her sandals were the wrong colour! Not to mention that her voice was too high pitched and she wasn't smiling out of nervous habit!

All wrong!

'Raiku… can you prove it's you?' Lee asked when it was clear no one was going to take her on her word.

Raiku scowled to herself. Fake Raiku looked uncertain. 'I know that Hyuuga Neji hates me because of my mission to Sand?' she offered.

Raiku knew damn well she'd be more awkward than that, and it only made the situation stick that much worse. She hadn't seen Ryuu and Daisukenojo to indicate this was the point at which they wanted her to strike, and since they would absolutely know where she was by now, that meant she should wait.

'Anyone could find that out,' Neji dismissed. Raiku gave a proud nod. Clearly, anyone could. Go Neji!

Lee shook his head. 'I think she's trying to avoid mentioning what happened on the mission?'

Damn Lee! Damn his misguided attempts to help "Raiku"!

'It… it's sort of embarrassing,' Fake Raiku hedged.

Neji was far too dignified to blush. But he turned his head away. Lee smiled tiredly. 'It's good to see you, Raiku.'

Fake Raiku paused. 'You're… not going to kill me?'

'Too troublesome,' Shikamaru decided, and Raiku's shadow-based favouritism instantly vanished.

Fake Raiku dropped her hands in relief, creasing her eyes warmly. 'Thanks!'

Raiku stared at them in horror, fingers digging so hard into the tree branch that it was beginning to crack. There was no way! That jittering coward had passed their inspection? She was an  _awkward_  coward, not a tentative one!

Raiku began to crackle as she fumed.

'So why are you all here in the same place, Lee?' Fake Raiku inquired, stepping closer to him. And that was it. Screw the rendezvous point, screw the final signal! No one gave people the wrong impression of how high they were placed in her affections by use of their first name! No one!

Raiku braced her feet on the tree and leaped off, propelled through the air faster than the average projectile and sprinting across the ground so quickly everyone else seemed to be standing still. She flung her arm out and used a move Daisukenojo had taught her, catching the girl's throat with the crook of her elbow. Fake Raiku choked and slammed into the ground as the blur solidified into Raiku, who promptly kicked the fraud.

' _That's_  for using the wrong level of formality!' she said triumphantly, slightly giddy with relief that that had actually worked. 'Don't you people do research? And  _you_ ,' she said, looking up from Fake Raiku to Lee, currently gaping. 'How could you honestly think this was me? Look at her!'

Lee realised it was futile to try and point out how eerily similar the two were as Raiku pointed at her victim. He stared in helpless shock at both of them, unable to register fully what had happened. 'Her eyes are  _all_  wrong! And her clothes! Look at them! Was this illusion made by some sort of colourblind Rookie!?' she demanded. 'And Hyuuga! I expected better from you!'

Neji's eyes, true to form, narrowed slightly. 'I see you failed to find your team.'

'No, I totally found them. Non-sequitur much?' she asked, giving him an odd look. 'This is an illusion that was trying to trick my team that we allowed to infiltrate so that I could incapacitate the one who tried to dispose of me and we could keep an eye on this one, thus lulling the third one that was undoubtedly carrying the scroll into a false sense of security.' She gasped for air, resting her hands on her knees. 'Very long sentence.'

'So where have you been?' Lee asked, blinking owlishly.

'Following Team Asuma. But that's not the point here,' she dismissed. She pointed at the fraud again. 'Look! It's a terrible fake!'

She kicked her again. 'Also? To the selective Byakugan and Sharingan users?' she asked, shooting them both glares. 'The one I caught? Told me this one was a boy! A  _boy_ , jerks!'

Neji was, again, too dignified to blush. But there was a suggestion that there could, one day, be some form of colour rising in his face.

Still muttering darkly under her breath, Raiku grabbed the ankles of the fraud and dragged them over to a bush, kicking their arms into the leaves to hide them completely. 'You guys all  _suck_ ,' she grumbled to herself. 'I no longer respect you, Hyuuga, and I'm very pissed off at you, Lee.'

'We tried to tell if it was you!' Lee ventured.

'I don't care!'

'You set a trap so that someone would set a trap?' Sakura asked, tilting her head slightly. Ino instantly grasped it and put it at the angle she preferred, still wielding her impromptu hairdressing implement.

'Well it's- trap,' she paused, suddenly wearing a hunted look. 'Trap, I know there was something I was meant to remember about a- oh.' She deflated, running a hand through her hair awkwardly. 'Oh, it's been about two days upside-down now. He's… he's definitely dead.'

'Who!?' Naruto exclaimed, finally cluing into the conversation. Raiku severed the wire attached to her fingers, resulting in a large thud moments later.

'No one!' she said hastily. 'Well,' she began awkwardly, taking a slow step back. 'You guys… seem really busy, and I should probably get back to my team…'

'Wait a second, how long have you been following us?!' Ino demanded.

'A while,' Raiku answered evasively. She took another step back.

'How long is "a while"?' Shikamaru asked, fixing her with a shrewd gaze.

'Since dawn,' she replied reluctantly. Her next step took her to the edge of the clearing. 'And on that note-,'

' _Raiku_ ,' Ryuu hissed from two inches behind her spine. She shrieked in reflexive terror, lunging several steps forward and spinning around. She clutched her heart, breathing heavily.

'What!? Why did you do that vampire thing again!?'

'You weren't meant to take out the imposter until we gave you the signal,' Ryuu growled, advancing.

'We lost the target,' Daisukenojo added as a sidelong explanation, leaning casually against a tree. 'So he's pretty pissed off. The fake was even more annoying than you are.'

'Thanks, Daisuke,' Raiku said flatly. 'That makes me feel really good about myself.' She backed off as Ryuu approached, yellow eyes burning with rage.

'… Would you like a hug?' she offered nervously, holding out only partially covered arms as she backtracked.

'He's not going to fall for it, toaster!' Daisukenojo called. 'Run!'

'Got it!' Raiku nodded fearfully, turning on her heel and promptly vanishing.

Ryuu froze, slowly turning his head back towards Daisukenojo. Daisukenojo shrugged unrepentantly. 'She was going to run anyway. How was I supposed to know she'd gotten better at using that kind of running?'

Ryuu growled and turned back, hands already forming a quick sequence of hand seals. 'I'll slow her down, you catch up,' he said over his shoulder. He paused before making the final seal, nodding to the current, stunned, occupants of the clearing. 'I apologise.'

He formed the last seal and vanished as though he'd been blown away by the sudden wind, which he technically had.

Daisukenojo shifted awkwardly under the intense scrutiny of the Genin still there, realising he'd  _yet again_  drawn the short straw. 'So… How's the Exam been?'

 

 

 

 

 

'Why does this keep happening to me?' Raiku lamented, currently dangling by one foot over a large, beautiful lake. The lake sparkled in the light, casting wavering reflections onto her and Ryuu's faces. Reeds shifted gently in the breeze on the sandy banks, disturbed slightly by the current of the river feeding the lake. 'I try to be a nice person. I've never killed anyone on purpose. I help little old ladies across the road.'

Ryuu sat on the grass next to the water, enjoying the breeze he'd generated. 'So,' he said, without opening his eyes. 'What have we learned?'

'I should definitely never try to hug you,' she said firmly. She screamed as the wire holding her up dropped her several inches. 'Never deviate from the plan!'

'Very good,' he smiled thinly. 'What else?'

'Don't run!?' she tried.

She dropped a few more inches. She raised her arms to protect her face, shaking.

'Right,' he said coolly.

'If I answered right then why did you still drop me!?' she screamed.

'Because you made me chase you.'

'I'm not going to fall for your stupid teleportation trap next time!' she snarled, glaring at him. 'You'll never catch me again!'

Ryuu tilted his head, opening his eyes a sliver. A yellow… ominous sliver.

She dropped abruptly, stopping only when the water grazed her hair. She could smell the damp breeze flitting lightly across the surface, the earthy smell so much like rain. She could feel the cooler air rising off it, and trembled so violently the wire started jerking on the branch.

'I will  _always_  catch you,' Ryuu said, looking at her intensely. 'Do you understand me?'

Too petrified to speak, she nodded, screwing her eyes shut.

He tilted his head again. 'Why are you so frightened of water?' he inquired.

'C-can't… swim,' she forced out, trying and failing to curl into a ball.

'That's not the only reason.' His fingers toyed with the wire threateningly.

'I can't turn the… thing off and it reacts badly to water!' she blurted out, wrapping her arms around herself and trying desperately to pretend she was somewhere else.

'How badly?'

'Very very very badly!'

'How much can you generate and for how long?'

'As much as I like, indefinitely! Also, as much as I don't want to, indefinitely!'

His eyebrows shot up. 'That's impressive.'

'Please don't drop me in there!' she wailed.

Ryuu looked at her for a while, not bothering to look away at Daisukenojo when he appeared, red-faced and out of breath.

'God, Ryuu, asshole much?' he asked dubiously, staring at Raiku's violently shaking form. 'How'd you catch her?'

'Lightning will always take the path of least resistance,' he said unhelpfully.

'Water's a good conductor,' Daisukenojo grinned. 'But toaster! We have good news for you!'

'….What…?' she asked weakly.

'We found the hidden scroll!'

'Oh… That's… that's nice…'

'And it's in this lake! We were going to ignore it and just go for what we had set up, but now that you're back do you think you'd like to get it for us?'

'No,' Ryuu interrupted before she could speak, getting to his feet. 'Not without a chakra net,' he specified, easily destroying Raiku's hopes. 'If you can make one good enough to keep her contained, we send her in.'

Daisukenojo cracked his knuckles. 'No problem.'

'Please don't drop me, please don't drop me,' Raiku repeated as a mantra, unable to bear opening her eyes and seeing the water. 'Please don't drop me.'

'How about some trust?' Daisukenojo asked, offended. 'You're hurting my feelings here.'

'Chakra net, if you please,' Ryuu sighed.

'I don't see why I should help you,' Daisukenojo muttered, spreading his hands. 'You left me alone to deal with those bastards…'

'I thought you had a crush on Tenten?'

Daisukenojo froze, the fine, spreading mesh of chakra halting in the middle of its creation.

'I'm not blind,' Ryuu said by way of explanation.

Daisukenojo flushed scarlet. 'Tell anyone and I'll kill you,' he muttered, resuming work.

'I want that net so fine not even a hair gets free,' Ryuu specified. 'Accomplish that and your secret's safe.'

'Sneakiest bastard… ever.'

'I have to agree!' Raiku called, trying to make herself disappear.

'It's done,' Daisukenojo announced, holding in his hands something that, for all intents and purposes, nearly invisible. He handed it to Ryuu, who stepped onto the surface of the lake towards Raiku, quickly and efficiently shrouding her in it.

'Please don't drop me,' she whimpered again.

'It's in the exact middle of the lake, wearing the same kind of mesh as you to keep it dry,' Ryuu commented. 'If you can't swim, I advise you hold your breath, sink to the bottom and walk.' He severed the cord.

It was a testament to Daisukenojo's truly formidably skill that as Raiku splashed into the water, there was no surge of electricity. It was a testament to Raiku's subconscious trust of Ryuu that she immediately let herself sink to the bottom, despite the liquid, terrifying cool of the water. She held her nose closed with her fingers, eyes squinting through the gloom to try and see the scroll. She could hear her heart beating so quickly it was like one continuous noise.

She found herself a new mantra as she forced a foot forward towards where she guessed the middle of the lake was.

_I hate Ryuu. I hate Ryuu. I hate Ryuu._

She stretched her fingers out nervously, groping along the floor for the scroll. Dirt billowed up in front of her face to complete the sensation of suffocation and to add to her claustrophobia as the mesh stretched over her skin.

 _I hate Ryuu_ _ **so much**_ …

After a short while of false hope and rocks, her lungs started to burn. She froze in terror.  _She was underwater_.

It finally struck her. She was blinded momentarily by electricity pouring out of her skin and encountering the mesh, struggling free and distorting the shape but unable to break it in her terrified state. Her fingers closed on something smooth- success!

Please let it be success, she prayed, raising her hand to her face. The Heaven scroll sat innocently in her palm, as though it weren't causing her all this trouble.

She sagged in relief, inadvertently allowing bubbles of air to escape.

Wait.

Her eyes widened.

_Now how the hell was she supposed to get out!?_


	19. hypothermia and suffocation

Raiku stood, arms tucked under her armpits, hair plastering to her face and scalp, and shivered. Her teeth chattered noisily and she instantly clamped her jaw shut. The inside of the tower was in a state of disrepair, cracks lining the concrete walls and rust corrupting the steel attached. It was lit by sunlight streaming in through worn, old windows, smudged and dirty. Ryuu was singed slightly and even more disgruntled than she was, arms folded across his chest and remaining obstinately silent.

'If you do not possess Heaven,' Daisukenojo read from the giant sign on the far wall. 'Gain knowledge and be prepared. If you do not possess Earth, run through the fields and seek strength-,'

'You'd know all about running, wouldn't you Raiku?' Ryuu sniped.

'Sh-shut…u-up,' she said through chattering teeth.

'-if you open both Heaven and Earth scrolls, dangerous paths will turn to safe ones,' Daisukenojo finished, stubbornly ignoring them. He looked down at the scrolls in his hands, raising his eyebrows. 'Should we wait for the fifth day to open them, or do it now?'

'Now's as good a time as any,' Ryuu said, rubbing his scorched hands gingerly. 'I save you  _yet again_  and what do I get? Electrocuted,' he muttered to Raiku. She tried to glare, but was shaking and dripping too much for it to have the desired effect.

Daisukenojo shrugged, grasping the scrolls and opening both at once. He shot them a weird look. 'I've never seen anything like this.'

'S-s-s-,' Raiku broke off, shivering too much to do anything.

'Seal?' Daisukenojo volunteered.

She shook her head, making a fist and then splaying her fingers out.

'Boom? I don't get it.'

'Summon?' Ryuu tried, grimacing in pain.

She nodded, tucking her hands back under her armpits again.

Daisukenojo looked down at the suddenly smoking scrolls. 'Shit.'

'Put them down and back off!' Ryuu ordered, taking a step back. Daisukenojo compromised and threw them away. They hit the far wall and rebounded, quickly engulfed by the smoke billowing up from them.

Raiku coughed feebly, and ended up sneezing.

'If you get sick I am  _so_  not healing you,' Daisukenojo warned.

Her answer was another sneeze.

'Long time no see,' a very, very familiar voice said, as the figure of a tall, masculine humanoid became identifiable in the fog.

'That Examiner guy was a summon!?' Daisukenojo exclaimed, stumbling back.

Ryuu's expression flattened. He cuffed the shorter boy over the back of the head.

'H-h-hey,' Raiku chattered out. As the smoke cleared, the bandaged man nodded in her direction.

'You guys have obviously gone to a lot of trouble.' His gaze lingered on Raiku's drenched, shaking form. 'And… effort.' He coughed into his hand, slightly awkward.

'Why the hell did you come out of that summon scroll!?' Daisukenojo demanded, pointing accusingly.

He shrugged, smirking, and put his hands in his pockets. 'The Chuunin were assigned a group to talk to about the next Exam if the group found both scrolls. I drew you guys.'

He gave a slow, mocking clap. 'So, well done.' His smirk turned into a fully-fledged grin as he took in the scorched, drenched and relatively unharmed Genin respectively. 'I guess you guys went after the hidden scroll.'

Instantly two furious sets of eyes slid over to shoot Raiku hostile looks. She sighed, dropping her head. 'S-sorry. H-how many t-times d-d-do I have to s-say it?'

'Shut up, toaster,' Daisukenojo muttered darkly.

'Anyway!' the bandaged man said loudly, interrupting what he suspected would have been a long, repetitive argument. 'I'm Hagane Kotetsu, Team Yamada. Congratulations on passing the Second Exam!'

Raiku sank to her knees in relief, settling in a rapidly expanding puddle of highly electrified water. Kotetsu snickered to himself. 'My other mission is to explain what's missing from up there,' he said, jerking a thumb at the sign on the wall behind him. 'It's something the Hokage wrote for anyone trying to be a Chuunin. Or,' he added. 'Shinobi at all. "Heaven" refers to a person's head, while "earth" refers to the body-,'

'Toaster, remember to breathe.'

'Yeah, speedy, you're going to pass out again!'

'W-will not.'

'HEY!' Kotetsu roared, looming over them threateningly. 'This is important, punks! Pay attention!'

When he was satisfied they were terrified into submission, he continued. 'So if you lack "Heaven" you should gain knowledge and be prepared. So, for example,  _none of you are using your heads to think about this_!'

Three winces.

'So you should study, and become smarter and wiser, as well as preparing for missions. Got it?' Kotetsu asked, suddenly cheerful. Raiku stared at him, trying desperately not to draw parallels between him and Yamada. 'And if you do not possess "Earth", you should run through the fields and seek strength. That means if you aren't sound in body, you should train, seeking strength. You got it so far?'

'Yes,' Ryuu said coolly.

'And if you have both "Heaven" and "Earth", then even dangerous missions will become safe ones.'

'What about the letter that's missing?' Ryuu asked, jerking his head at the sign. 'It's not finished.'

Kotetsu grinned, sticking his hands in his pockets. 'It's the letter than symbolises a Chuunin. The symbol for "human" that was on the scrolls goes into that space.'

'Clever,' Ryuu said dryly.

Kotetsu scratched the side of his jaw absently. 'Call it what you want. These past… two and a half days, for you guys, tested the basic survival abilities required of a Chuunin. Since you passed, you've got basics down.' He looked at Raiku, and snickered. 'Well… most of the basics.'

She narrowed her eyes at him.

'But a Chuunin has to do more than just survive- a Chuunin is a leader, in the commander-class, and needs to have the ability to lead a team and accept the duty of doing that. So it's important that you remember to commit to heart the message up there- the importance of both strength and preparations in missions. If you remember that, you will succeed as a Chuunin.'

He stopped, raising his eyebrows in silent question. 'Huh…' he said eventually. 'That seems to be all I had to tell you. So, I wish you three luck with the Third Exam. You'll have to go and wait for the end of this one.'

'Wait… whe-,'

With a puff of smoke, all four of them vanished.

 

 

 

 

 

They appeared in a hallway lined with typical waiting room seats. There was a potted plant standing next to the grey chairs, leaning against the worn, brick-coloured walls.

'D-dry me off,' Raiku ordered Ryuu through chattering teeth, dripping onto the tiles. There was a clock, ticking obnoxiously high on the wall to her left.

'Whoa, you guys want a room or something?' Daisukenojo asked, holding up his hands.

'Sh-shut up!' she gritted out, hunching to try and conserve body heat. 'H-he can d-do it w-with his t-t-,' she failed to force out the word on the first try, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath before trying again. 'T-t-technique,' she finished triumphantly.

'Daisukenojo, heal me please,' Ryuu said boredly, sitting in one of the uncomfortable grey chairs and ignoring her.

'Aren't you going to do your…' Daisukenojo wiggled his fingers vaguely. 'Wind thing?'

'Absolutely not,' Ryuu said, glaring at Raiku out of the corner of his eye. 'Not after I saved her from drowning and she tried to barbecue me.'

'A-a-accident!' she maintained damply, turning her nose up in offence.

Daisukenojo held up a hand over Ryuu's scorched face, glowing faintly with his pale chakra. 'You two are made for each other,' he grumbled testily.

There was a stunned silence in which both parties simply stared at him.

'Barbecue him,' Ryuu ordered.

'Waaaaay ah-head of you,' she growled, rolling up her sleeves. The threatening demeanour failed when the air conditioned air hit her wet, sparking skin and she instantly covered it back up. She sat on the floor in her growing, sparking puddle and sighed heavily. She stared up at Daisukenojo's focused face, just opposite Ryuu's cold one.

Daisukenojo had a crush on Tenten? That would be… interesting. He was naturally belligerent, argumentative and stubborn. But he was cute, in his way, and growing to be handsome. His red hair, right now practically shaved, was more attractive when long, granted, but his freckles were fading into his tan and his eyes were bright and challenging. He was muscular for his height, now roughly level with hers, and confident in his own physical abilities. That being said, he generally attracted the shy ones, so Tenten would be a challenge for him. Not to mention who Tenten's Plot was saving for the oddly haired girl- Neji.

There was where Daisukenojo would encounter the most trouble, Raiku suspected. Neji was statuesque and beautiful, dignified and powerful. Daisukenojo was the antithesis of Neji's physical attributes, far more earthen in his appeal. In fact…

Unwillingly, she looked over at Ryuu. Ryuu would be more of Tenten's type. Ryuu's face was statuesque in a similar fashion to Neji but not as beautiful, his cheekbones too sharp and his eyes slightly too narrow to imitate it, giving him a more dangerous impression. He conveyed iciness, and his lean, tall frame only enhanced his natural air of sneakiness. His yellow eyes, however, made him seem like some sort of predatory animal, and his naturally light sensitive pupils shrunk in normal light, making them seem cat-like. His grey hair was off-putting for normal girls, but tragically her plan had backfired and he now seemed partial to the short, loose spikes his hair formed.

Raiku looked down at herself, and growled in frustration. Raiku was still stick-thin, long limbed and spiky-haired. Goodie.

Ryuu probably had a crush on no one, which was troublesome. If he would just  _get a damned girlfriend_  her life would become much less dramatic. It would be much, much worse if Tenten moved on from Neji to him though, and her gaze had certainly been somewhat interested when Ryuu showed up.

Raiku shuddered suddenly, earning her Ryuu's dispassionate stare. She'd heard two girls from her Rookie year talking about how Ryuu always had something in his mouth. She'd tried to bring up that it was usually a piece of grass, but then they'd started on about oral fixations and  _talents_ …

She turned faintly green.

It was lucky for Raiku she had the characteristics she did, really: there would be no need to think about someone's…  _talents_ , for her. Not now, not ever. A layer of cloth surrounded her world, giving her a disembodied sort of relationship with the people connected to it. Contact was, whether people liked to admit it or not, one of the key points of a personal relationship. Without that ability Raiku failed to establish intimate connections, and probably would never be able to. And under that layer of cloth was something much more personal: that layer of electricity. It was, in all senses of the word, her only intimate relationship.

All in all, a life devoid of all physical contact, much less skin-to-skin contact had given her a somewhat detached sense of life, as well as developing something far more inconvenient:

It was the family's suspicion she would have developed that chronic fear of touch, though she couldn't know for sure.

'Done,' Daisukenojo announced, removing his hand and instantly, easily breaking her train of thought. He stepped back, proudly surveying his handiwork. 'Not bad, if I do say so myself.'

'Your chakra control has improved rapidly,' Ryuu acknowledged, voice slightly hoarse. 'But you allowed it to go too far from the point of injury. If you keep letting it do it, you'll be drained quicker and the injury will take longer to close.'

Daisukenojo snorted, folding his arms across his chest defensively. 'I know- I'm working on it, alright?'

Ryuu nodded.

'You gonna do your wind-y crap?' Daisukenojo asked, following his line of sight to the curiously absent Raiku. Ryuu shook his head.

'Not yet. Raiku,' he said, raising his voice and snapping his fingers in the air next to her. 'Snap out of it.'

She frowned and gave his fingers a half-hearted glare.

'I think she's going to freeze,' Daisukenojo observed, sitting heavily in the chair next to Ryuu. They folded their arms and tilted their heads at her, considering.

She fidgeted under their gaze, shifting uncomfortably.

'Probably,' Ryuu agreed.

'Do you think if we stare at her for long enough, she'll blush herself out of it?' Daisukenojo grinned.

'For a medic's son, you don't know much about the human body.'

Daisukenojo flushed. 'That was a joke, asshole!'

'Of course,' Ryuu snorted.

For the next few minutes the only sound was the steady clicking of the analogue clock on the far wall, measuring time spent and left.

With a quiet plume of smoke, three more Genin appeared. The beautiful blonde Sand-nin blinked in well-concealed surprise as she took in the presence of three other Genin, but took it in stride. More specifically she took in the sight of the soaking wet, nigh-hypothermic Raiku, and grinned.

'So, I guess a team made it before us after all… eh, Kankuro?' she drawled, crossing her arms and deliberately shifting her weight to one leg.

The cat hat boy smirked.

Raiku sent Ryuu a pleading look, under the none-too-friendly gaze of three sardonic Sand-nin.

'Felt like swimming?' Kankuro asked, grinning hugely.

'N-n-not really,' Raiku forced out, pleading look intensifying by five hundred. She turned to the Sand-nin and managed a somewhat friendly, if stiff wave to the third member, before sticking her hand back under her armpit. 'R-Ryuu,' she said beseechingly, looking over at him again.

Ryuu sighed. 'Promise not to do it again?'

'C-can't,' she said helplessly. 'D-didn't mean t-to d-d-do it at all.'

He rolled his eyes. 'Fine.'

He leaned forward, shifting his hand into his curious seal and concentrating intensely. Raiku sighed with bliss as the air around her shot up in temperature. 'Th-thanks,' she sighed happily.

'The next time you electrocute me, I'm leaving you to drown,' he cautioned. The blonde Sand-nin relaxed into a chair with easy grace, tossing the other team a dismissive smirk. Kankuro took a step closer to Raiku, bending down.

He flicked the side of her mask, earning him a quiet squeak. 'You Konoha-nin have a thing for masks, huh?' he asked, grin spreading for reasons Raiku didn't know but instantly didn't trust.

'I n-need it,' she said, finding speaking growing quickly easy. Or, as easy as it ever was for her. Which was to say: not easy at all but constantly somewhat awkward, regardless of circumstances or company.

He grabbed a small part of it and pulled lightly, tenting it over her skin. 'Why's that, kid?'

'Because I d-don't actually have a m-mouth. I s-speak with t-telepathy,' she joked weakly. 'It's a s-serious illness.'

'How old are you, kid?' he asked, disregarding her terrible joke.

'Th-thirteen,' she answered warily.

'You seem a lot younger,' he said, letting the mask snap back onto her face.

'It's b-because I'm a t-twig,' she said nervously.

'Ah,' Ryuu said to himself, quite at random. Kankuro turned his head, and Raiku instantly used the distraction to inch away along the floor.

'Something to say?'

'No,' Ryuu dismissed him with offensive ease. 'But I remembered where I knew your teacher from.'

'What? Bandage guy? Where?' Daisukenojo asked in surprise.

'He was the one who said he'd eat his own forehead protector if we made it through the storm,' Ryuu reminded him carelessly. 'I wonder if we can still cash in on that.'

A wicked grin appeared on Daisukenojo's face. 'That would be awesome!'

Ryuu expression was perfectly deadpan. 'Undoubtedly.'

Kankuro straightened, as there was no longer a Raiku next to him to quietly menace. 'We'll see,' he shrugged with deceptive carelessness. Ryuu nodded, eyes cool.

'I suppose we will.'

Raiku inched too far. She squeaked again as she ran into something unyielding, twisting herself uncomfortably to try and see what it was. She learned a valuable lesson.

Gaara is even more terrifying from below.

Her eyes rounded to roughly half the size of her face, and blinked. 'H-hey,' she offered slowly, inching back the other way, realising Kankuro was there and standing up instead. She hesitated, unsure of which side was worse, and turned to Gaara again. She creased her eyes into a smile. 'Nice to s-see you again, mystery-nin,' she said pleasantly, holding out her hand to shake.

Gaara's blank green eyes flicked down to her hand, arms remaining folded across his chest.

'It wouldn't k-kill you to- Ryuu, this t-technique is magic,' she said over her shoulder, casting him a relieved look.

He sniffed, looking away.

'But it wouldn't kill you to tell me your name,' Raiku finished saying to Gaara, raising her other hand to rub the back of her rapidly drying hair nervously. Drying meant it wouldn't be straight for much longer, and it was already rising into the air slightly.

Gaara's eyes narrowed minutely.

Raiku tilted her head, eyes still creased. 'Please?'

The clock couldn't bear the silence any longer, and ticked louder. After it had been ticking obnoxiously loud for several minutes, Gaara spoke.

'Gaara,' he said coldly. he seemed to expect some sort of reaction, but Raiku had been  _trained_. She was _ready_ for that.

Raiku's smile upped in wattage. 'Nice to meet you, Gaara! Well, officially,' she amended awkwardly, dropping her hand. 'Because I've already met you twice. Well, three times. But the second time didn't count because you… didn't talk. And my foot was stuck in  _sand_ ,' she frowned, losing the train of the conversation in favour of her own distractions. 'Sand? I mean… sand? That's just … confusing.'

'Toaster.'

'Also, it seems sort of weird! The only substance that I genuinely have trouble with that isn't water-,'

'Toaster!' Ryuu barked, cutting off her impromptu explanation of her weaknesses. She yelped in surprise, spinning to face him.

'What!?' she demanded.

'Focus,' Ryuu sighed. 'You were talking to someone.'

She winced, spinning back to face Gaara, ducking her head in a bow. 'I'm sorry! I… uh… get distracted,' she said sheepishly, rubbing the back of her head again. She lifted her head to smile at him again. 'Nice to meet you though!'

'He's called Gaara of the Sand,' Kankuro said from just behind her. She flinched.

'Why does everyone like sneaking up on me…?' she asked herself in an incredulous whisper, before snapping out of it. 'Gaara of the Sand? I'm Raiku of the self-explanatory!'

The clock ticked.

'It's… it's because of… nevermind.' Raiku deflated.

'Because of the electricity?' Ryuu sighed wearily.

'Yes,' she nodded. She set her hands on her hips. 'Well, it was nice to see you again, Gaara! I'm sorry that I sort of rambled.'

Gaara looked at her for a moment. He seemed to contemplate killing her, but then abruptly turned and walked to a seat.

Raiku sighed heavily, shoulders slumping. 'I'm not good with new people,' she said sadly to Kankuro. He snorted and sat with his teammates, clapping her briefly on the shoulder.

'You're an idiot,' Ryuu announced as she walked back towards them.

'Yeah, yeah,' she mumbled.

Daisukenojo took pity on her, as he usually did, patting her sympathetically on the shoulder and moving over a seat so she could sit between them. 'One day you'll meet someone who doesn't instinctively hate your guts, toaster! Promise!'

'And then I'll  _kill_  them, because I kill  _everyone_  who I spend extended periods of time with,' she muttered darkly, earning her a look from Kankuro.

'We're still alive,' he pointed out.

'I got pretty close to killing Ryuu today,' she countered.

'Yeah, but no one cares about-,' Daisukenojo was cut off, suddenly moving his lips without sound coming out.

Raiku glared at Ryuu. 'Was that necessary? He healed you after all.'

Ryuu looked nonchalant. 'Don't know what you're talking about.' She rolled her eyes.

Daisukenojo continued to flail, clutching his throat. He was starting to go red, tapping Ryuu weakly on the shoulder. Raiku shot Ryuu a horrified look. 'Did you steal his oxygen!?'

'Possibly.'

'Give it back!'

'No.'

She pulled at the leather of her glove threateningly. 'Ryuu…' They glared at each other for a few seconds as Daisukenojo went blue in the background, before he finally growled in frustration and conceded.

'Don't get used to it, toaster.' He snapped his fingers and Daisukenojo inhaled sharply, resting his hands on his knees.

'I… hate… you,' he panted.

Raiku sunk down in her chair wearily, hiding her face. 'Still… the worst team… ever.'


	20. mercy and photophobia

By the time Team Gai arrived, Raiku was what for her, passed as half naked.

She sat next to her teammates with a chair pulled away from the wall to face them, casually discussing the benefits of Daisukenojo and Ryuu coming up with a better nickname for her when they appeared. Her sleeves and shin wrappings were on a chair so they could dry- Ryuu's patience only extending so far. They ignored the quiet 'poof' sound and continued disagreeing with each other, right up until the team realised they could actually  _see her skin_. It was scandalous, the reaction instantaneous. Tenten blinked in mild surprise, Neji… narrowed his eyes, so maybe it was in reaction to something else- it was hard to tell with that guy- and Lee choked.

'R-Raiku!' Lee forced out, staring at her with wide eyes as the smoke around them began to dissipate. She froze, back tensing as they gaped at it. 'Why are you… you're half naked!'

'I'm fully dressed! Why does everyone always think that me showing my arms is nudity!?' she demanded incredulously. 'Do I exude indecency!?' She looked over her shoulder, shooting him a glare.

He sagged in relief. 'You still have your mask on- that's good!' He shot her a dazzling smile.

Her look turned poisonous. 'You have something to say about my face, Lee!?'

'No!' he denied instantly, taking a step back and not quite knowing why. 'Of course not!'

'It sounds like he does,' Daisukenojo gloated, leaning forward to watch the show. 'You've heard the theories about what's under the mask, right?'

'Theories?' she asked in a low voice, glowering at Lee. Lee cringed.

'I have no theories! I swear it to you!'

'Oh yes- the  _theories_ ,' Ryuu said, eyes sparkling with malicious glee. 'They have bets, you know. I think Naruto started it.'

'They'll never know the truth,' Daisukenojo said, and the two nodded at each other sagely.

'The truth?' Lee asked, unaware they were trying to get him to dig his own grave. 'You know the truth of Raiku's face!? Is it true what they say?'

'What do they say?' Raiku asked warily.

'They say that you're horribly disfigured,' Lee supplied promptly. Raiku let her head fall forward until it hit her knees as her teammates fell about themselves laughing, much to Lee's chagrin.

'That's nice, Lee,' she sighed. 'Now I'm going to curl into a ball and die of mortification.'

'It's… it's not that bad,' Daisukenojo forced out, wiping a tear of mirth from his eye. 'You're not hideous, toaster… not completely…'

'You saw my face by accident!' she accused, leaping to her feet and making a threatening gesture. 'And I did it to save your lives! You could have died if I hadn't!'

'Yeah… the lightning probably ran away when it saw you!' Daisukenojo clutched his sides, trying desperately to contain himself.

Raiku growled, fists clenching and unclenching uselessly at her sides. The disfigurement rumour would have been spread by her family in an attempt to discourage people for taking her inhumanity as mystery and being suitably intrigued, but it still made her uncomfortable. Like it or not Raiku hadn't seen her own face clearly… ever, as mirrors were too easily broken and her family superstitious, so it was somewhat of a sore spot. Ugliness was beneficial, but she could hardly be 'horribly disfigured'… could she?

'Raiku, there's an easy way to settle this!' Lee pointed out, blushing as he tried to be sneaky. Lee was many things, but scrupulously honest was usually one of them, and he was incredibly easily embarrassed. 'You could just… take the mask off.'

She felt eight pairs of eyes suddenly fix on her, and felt appropriately awkward. She twitched under their gaze, trying to avoid the waves of hostility being sent her way by the former mystery-nin.

'I think… I'd rather keep it on,' she said awkwardly. She pulled at it self-consciously, and resolved to never, ever show any skin again.

'I'm sure you're as lovely as the iconic figure of celestial lightning that your name is derived from!' Lee proclaimed, something dangerously close to tears brimming in his eyes.

Daisukenojo tried, he really did.

But in the end he couldn't hold it in. He started laughing again, burying his face in his arms, shoulders shaking with the force of it. 'Her name!' he managed, as Ryuu snickered with considerably more dignity. 'Her name!'

Raiku sighed, sitting down. 'It's really cold in here,' she muttered, having given up on stopping them completely. It could only help her, right? 'This exam better be over soon.'

 

 

 

 

 

When Team Kurenai arrived, it was the very, very early morning of the next day. They hadn't been allowed to leave- anyone who left could re-enter the forest, tip the scales. Raiku was happily curled into a seat with her blanket-that-was-not-technically-a-blanket-but-used-to-be-a-shuriken, her thin frame making it easy for her to fold up into a relatively small amount of space. The pale blue light of the moon spilled in through the small, high windows, casting everything in tones of dark blue and pitch black and giving the world that strange, detached caste.

The smoke appeared silently, no doubt out of consideration for the sleeping Genin on the part of the Chuunin sending the team, but the Genin being sent were hardly as considerate. The pearl-eyed Hinata stepped out silently and looked for a place to sit, keeping her taller, reclusive Aburame teammate close at hand. And then… there was the third member.

'Spastic!' Kiba greeted loudly, grinning as the smoke cleared enough for him to make out her form in the dark. 'Your team made it after all!'

Raiku jerked awake with a quiet sound of protest. 'You'd better not be talking to me,' she mumbled, burying her face into her blanketed knees.

'Whoa,  _someone_ ' _s_  not very cheerful in the morning!' he said with deliberately high volume, making him at least six new enemies. Neji had of course woken up the second they'd arrived, and glowered at them. The moonlight shining off his pearly eyes was particularly terrifying, resembling nothing less than a nocturnal predator.

'I'm a morning person, but Ryuu's not, Inuzaka,' she grumbled, trying in vain to compress herself into invisibility. Kiba froze, finally picking up on why the room seemed so cold. Ryuu's bloodshot, infuriated gaze greeted him when he turned away, the red making the yellow appear sickly and the entire cast of his face demonic as he looked up at the fanged boy.

' _Shut. Up_.'

'Man, you need some sort of happy pill,' Kiba criticised.

Without hesitation or apparent provocation, Raiku picked up her blanket, drew it around her shoulders and moved over to sit next to Rock Lee in the dark where he sat sprawl across two chairs, shoving him over slightly and resting her back against his. Secure in the knowledge he wouldn't be able to touch her skin at this angle, she buried her face in her blanket and tried to ignore Kiba's yelps of pain or Akamaru's barks of protest.

'Raiku,' Hinata whispered across, tugging on her blanket lightly. Raiku cracked an eye open, instantly sending pale light across and into Hinata's eyes. If her status as a human flashlight was worthy of comment, no one felt obligated to do so.

'Yeah?' she whispered, rubbing an eye roughly with her palm.

'C-can you help K-Kiba, please?' she asked. 'I think R-Ryuu is suffocating him.'

Raiku dropped her head wearily. 'I moved away for a reason.'

'Please?' she asked tentatively.

Raiku opened her eye again, looking at Hinata. She sighed in resignation. 'Okay. Just stop looking at me like that,' she muttered.

She shuffled onto her feet in a way completely devoid of anything near grace and towards Ryuu, folding the blanket over her arm and stifling a yawn. 'Ryuu?' she asked sleepily, dragging one of her sleeves off and putting it to rest over the blanket.

' _What_?' Ryuu hissed across to her, yellow eyes flashing malevolently as Kiba struggled for air. She squinted in concentration. Her arm gave off a brief but intensely bright flash before the blue dragged itself back into her skin, leaving it with a faint hum. Ryuu gave a hoarse cry and covered his eyes, instantly releasing the technique Kiba suffered through. Kiba gasped for air, holding his chest.

'Thanks, spastic,' he panted heavily, blinking to clear the dark spots in his vision. Raiku nodded sleepily, shuffling over to Ryuu and dropping onto her knees beside him.

'Ryuu?' she mumbled, leaning to try and look into his eyes. 'Are you alright?'

'Don't… look at me,' he forced out between teeth gritted in pain.

Her brow wrinkled in concern. 'I'm sorry, Ryuu. Are you really angry with me?'

'You idiot,' he hissed, pressing his hand harder over his eyes. 'Your eyes… are like a torch.'

She winced and instantly closed her eyelids until only a sliver of blue could be seen, sending a pale stream of light out to hit his arm, broken by that line of shadow until it hit his hand. 'Is that better?' she whispered.

He cracked his eyes open, and nodded. 'I'm sorry,' she repeated. 'But you're never reasonable in the mornings, so I thought if I asked you'd just kill me.'

He nodded, covering his eyes again. 'Go back to sleep, Raiku.'

She nodded in return, getting to her feet with a yawn and shoving Lee back up into a sitting position, sitting with her back to him and squirming until she was comfortable. And yes, her shoulder blades were sticking into his back and yes; the static from her hair was making his shiny bowl cut slightly dishevelled, but Lee was nothing if not a gentleman and put up with it.

'R-Raiku?' Hinata whispered again, as the Aburame lifted three chairs from the wall and carried them to the other side of the room for their use. Raiku cracked an eye open again, sending another, gentler ray of light across as she started to fall asleep again and the light lessened accordingly.

'Thank you,' Hinata said softly, giving her a rare and beautiful smile. 'F-for helping me.'

'No problem,' Raiku whispered, closing her eyes again. 'Good deeds get forgotten first anyway... so you should repeat them as often as you can.'

'I won't forget,' Hinata promised her very, very quietly and with a certainty that any who knew the timid Hyuuga would be surprised at. Under her mask, Raiku's lips twitched upwards slightly.

'Yes you will. Everyone'll forget me…' she mumbled, trailing off as she fell further into sleep. 'I… have no fate.' It was true- Plots tended to disregard Gairanos, and as a result anyone who had one forgot them simply to make life easier. They stuck out, like a broken bottle in a room full of glasses, and the last thing a Plot wanted was for a Character to cut themselves on them when there were perfectly good  _other_  things for them to reach for. But Hinata didn't know that and so just turned away, and because Lee was a gentleman he simply pretended he didn't hear what wasn't for his ears anyway, and in the corner of the room a second pair of white eyes narrowed in suspicion.

 

 

 

 

 

Later than same day (not that there wasn't a large abundance of 'later' and a shortage of 'earlier'), the team from Sound arrived. And all hell broke loose. Or rather, it tried and tripped over itself.

Kin caught sight of the white haired girl still dozing, now sprawled rather comfortably across a chair that a normal person who be hard pressed to even  _sit_  comfortably in, legs thrown over the side and neck at a curious angle. She opened her mouth-

Ryuu fixed a bloodshot yellow eye on her, full of limitless rage and conveying images of unspeakable things.

She closed her mouth and glowered, turning away. 'Third rate girl like that isn't worth my time,' she muttered.

The three Sound-nin moved to the furthest end of the room.

Kiba poked the masked side of Raiku's face curiously, squatting next to her chair, grinning at her half-conscious efforts to turn away. 'Heavy sleeper, huh?'

'Don't poke her,' Daisukenojo warned from the scroll he brought with him everywhere, the Hatori name written on it in large letters.

He poked her again and she grumbled in her sleep petulantly. 'Why?'

'Don't poke her,' he repeated, not looking away from the writing.

Kiba jabbed her again. He promptly went slamming into the opposite wall so hard it cracked slightly under his weight, plaster flakes and dust fluttering down to turn his hair into a salt and pepper colour.

He blinked, sparks jumping off his scorched eyelashes.

Daisukenojo absently unfurled more of the scroll. 'I told you not to poke her.'

Raiku turned her head away, frowning slightly in her sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

When the Team Asuma arrived, it was the afternoon of the fourth day and Raiku was awake. She was also trying… and failing, to beat Kankuro at a game called 'mercy'.

'Mercy,' she whimpered, hands bent almost back onto her forearms. 'Mercy!'

Kankuro grinned, pressing harder. 'Who wins?'

'You win! Don't be such a jerk!'

He released her hands with an ominous cracking sound and started cracking his knuckles. 'Oh, you're damn right I win,' he grinned. 'So what do I get?'

'Nothing,' Kiba called over. 'Raiku gives up too easily for you to win anything, sucker!'

Raiku gave him a sheepish grin. Kankuro cursed. 'Again.' He reached for her gloved hands. Raiku whimpered in protest.

'So much for being the first team,' Shikamaru said dryly.

'Ha! Sakura's not here yet,' Ino said triumphantly, setting her hands on her hips.

He sighed, rolling his eyes, and went to wrangle them some seats.

 

 

 

Kabuto's team arrived in the night. They didn't speak to anyone. They didn't look at anyone. They sat against the wall and made it easy to be ignored.

 

 

 

On the morning of the fifth day, Team Kakashi scraped in by the skin of their teeth, arriving battered and beaten, to the sounds of heckling from Ino and catcalls from Kiba. Raiku inched back and away from the plot that reached for her.

 

 

 

 

Now they stood in an enormous, semicircular room, in their team lines before the Hokage and the assorted Jounin Captains of their teams. The room was circular and the walls shaped into a dome, ending in large windows that illuminated the room. One side was host to a massive sculpture of two hands and an assortment of blank black screens breaking up the grey-green tiles. The floor was obviously worn with numerous previous battles, and an elevated viewing balcony lining each side of the room told the story of previous Exams.

Yamada winked at them, grinning proudly. Ryuu didn't acknowledge it, standing at the front of the line- rather than exuding boredom, she'd realised a long time ago, when tired Ryuu instead exuded a palpable feeling of rage that came off him in almost visible waves of black intent.

She eyed him warily. She was really hoping she didn't have to fight him.

'First off!' Anko exclaimed from the right of the room, wearing microphone headset. 'Congratulations on passing the Second Exam!'

Raiku froze. Damn! She had! What had she been thinking?! Clearly, she hadn't been!

'We will now have an explanation of the Third Exam from Hokage-sama!' Anko announced. 'Everyone- listen well.' She turned and bowed her head in respect. 'Hokage-sama. Please do the honours.'

The Hokage stepped forward, the omnipresent pipe hanging out of his mouth, and coughed slightly. 'The Third Exam will begin. But before the explanation, there's one thing I want to make clear to all of you.'

Hinata edged away from Ryuu, and Raiku winced in sympathy. This wasn't going well already.

'It's about the true purpose of this exam,' Hokage continued. 'Why we need a Chuunin Exam. "To maintain good relations with the allied nations" and "heighten the level of the ninja"… Do not let these reasons deceive you.'

Plot device? Raiku pondered. The Chuunin Exams were clearly just a tool for the Plot.

'This "Exam", so to speak, is…' he stopped, removing his pipe and exhaling smoke. He looked at them for a while before he spoke again. 'The epitome of war between the allied nations.'

Tenten leaned out from behind the back. 'What do you mean?' she asked incredulously.

Raiku sighed. Again with the interruptions. Unbelievable.

'If we go back through history, the allied nations right now were neighbouring countries that have fought each other over and over again. To avoid wasting military power, these countries decided to choose a place to fight. That was the beginning of the Chuunin Selection Exams.'

Naruto gaped, taken aback. 'Why do we have to do that? We're not doing this to select Chuunins?'

Raiku tilted her head, considering it. Ah. It was clear.

'Yes,' the Hokage allowed. 'This Exam does select those who are worthy of that title. But, on the other hand, it's also a place where ninja fight and carry their country's dignity. In this Third Exam, feudal lords and famous people from various countries who may be powerful clients are invited here as guests. And feudal lords from countries with hidden villages and ninja leaders will see your battles. If there's a significant difference in power, the leading village will be flooded with jobs. If a country is seen as weak, the jobs will decrease. And at the same time, countries-,'

It was at this point, to Raiku, the words "country" and "countries" ceased to sound like words, and instead just became sounds.

'- are able to show how their village has grown and possesses excellent military power to adjacent countries. In other words, they can put foreign pressure on them.'

Kiba growled. 'So why do we have to fight with the risk of losing our lives?!'

'A country's power,' the Hokage said simply. 'Is the village's power. A village's power is the ninja's power. And a ninja's true strength is born in life or death battles.

'This Exam is also a place to show off the ninja power of one's country. Since this is an Exam where you fight with your life on the line, it has a meaning, and your predecessors have fought and dreamed of the Chuunin Exams because of it.'

Raiku had most definitely not dreamed of death. Her life was designed to be inherently devoid of meaning.

'But why do you say it's to promote good relations!?' Tenten exclaimed.

'I told you at the beginning not to get confused with that,' the Hokage deadpanned. 'The custom of shaving-,'

Raiku blinked. Shaving? No, he must have meant cultivating. Well, he was a little odd.

'-one's life and fighting to maintain balance… that  _is_  the good relation in the world of the ninja.'

She nodded, instantly at ease and level with what he was saying. It was like a Gairano theory, only bigger! Her entire life's philosophy fitted with that.

'This is a life or death battle for your dreams and your village's dignity.'

Naruto grinned smugly. 'Heh. I understand now.'

Gaara's expression was as hostile as ever. 'I don't care. Tell us the details of this life-or-death Exam.'

The Hokage nodded. 'Then I will now begin the explanation of the Third Exam, but…' he coughed.

Instantly a Jounin dropped from… somewhere into a respectful crouch before the Hokage, back to the rest of them. 'Excuse me, Hokage,' he said in a low, smooth voice. 'I, Gekkou Hayate, the judge, will explain.'

'Please do.'

The Jounin raised himself into a standing position. 'Everyone. It is nice to meet you.' He turned to face the assembled Genin, coughing in a distinctly unhealthy way. 'Everyone, before we begin the Third Exam…' he broke off coughing again. Raiku stared at him oddly. 'There is something I want you to do…' When his coughs had, for the third time already, stopped, he smirked slightly. 'Fight in some preliminary matches to see who gets to advance to the Third Exam main battles.'

Raiku smiled a dazzling smile. Things were looking up after all.


	21. blood and cereal

Raiku sat on top of the wall of the Gairano Compound, legs crossed as she sat and watched the sun sink down below the horizon. Dim orange and red light bathed her covered face, and a breeze she didn't feel ruffled her hair gently as it blew sweetly past. The sunset transformed Konoha into a place of serenity in this time between the fading of the bright sunlight and the automatic activation of the artificial lights that dotted the streets. Raiku's lips twitched slightly as she watched it, sighing in contentment. Under the guise of cowardice it had been easy to leave prior to the preliminary rounds, waving goodbye to her disgruntled teammates. In the light of the setting sun, it was the best decision for her to have made. Distant explosions sent mild vibrations through the walls as the Genin battled it out to make it to the Third Exam, faint tremors running through the ground and up the walls.

'Pretty,' someone said quietly.

Raiku nodded cheerfully, leaning back on her hands. 'Yeah.'

For a moment there was a somewhat expectant silence, until with a quiet exhalation two hands placed themselves on the wall next to her, hoisting the owner up.

Raiku didn't look away from the scene, tilting her head with that faint smile on her lips that required no crease of her eyes. A smile that simply an expression, not for a purpose.

For a moment the two females sat next to each other, until the taller, brown haired woman spoke, breaking the tranquil silence.

'I heard you left the Exams.'

Raiku nodded serenely.

'I did.'

Mura nodded, expression thoughtful.

Raiku stretched her neck languidly after a few minutes of silence, lips twitching upwards again.

'Do you forgive me?'

Mura paused, eyes flicking over to the cement just to the side of Raiku's leg. After a while, she nodded.

'You've always got time to change your mind,' she said softly.

Raiku's eyes creased ever so slightly, a result of her widening smile rather than affectation.

'No,' she said simply. 'I won't.'

Mura nodded again.

'No,' she said after a long silence. 'I don't suppose you will.'

They sat silently in the growing dark.

 

 

 

 

 

As Raiku entered- stumbled, shuffled into- the kitchen the next morning, scratching the side of her face and yawning hugely, her father serenely sipped his tea. 'Morning.'

'Morning,' she said, pushing her hair out of her eyes and making for the cupboard. She was wrist-deep in a packet of cereal when her father seemed to remember something. He turned a page of his newspaper with feigned nonchalance.

'Your teammate's in the hospital.'

She froze. Sugar practically crystalised on her hand as the high-calorie cereal tried to demand attention from its suddenly reluctant devourer.

He sipped calmly. 'Are you going to go visit him?'

Raiku paused, mechanically raising cereal to her mouth. She inclined her head consideringly. 'Might.'

He nodded absently. 'You want to know which one it is?'

Another pregnant pause. Her father's eyes slowly slid up as his head remained motionless, making direct eye contact. This time he didn't look away as her eyes burned directly into his retinas. She shrugged with slow, deliberate caution. 'I suppose.'

That was the way- cautious, non-specific and noncommittal answers. Show no concern, favouritism or inclination to situations predisposed to Drama. Don't care. Rather, care, but act careless.

'The boy without a last name,' he began, pausing to sip his tea. She grimly hoped he'd choke on it.

'Ryuu?' she asked, too quickly. She winced, glad he was looking back at his newspaper.

'... Hospitalised the Hatori boy,' he finished, glancing at her meaningfully.

'Ah,' she said slowly, trying desperately not to speak as quickly. 'That's... unfortunate.' She chewed on another mouthful of cereal, feeling as though she was trying to tap dance on a minefield.

She narrowed her eyes slightly.

No. This was worse than a minefield. She could  _deal_  with a minefield. Any Konoha-nin could do that. This was far, far worse. There was no accurate metaphor for this, or if there was Raiku had no chance of knowing it. This was, simply put, a test.

'Quite badly injured, the both of them,' her father continued on, turning another page. It rustled with unbearable volume in the tense air. 'But one... obviously came out on top.'

'I wonder how he won,' she thought aloud. That was permissible. Gauging strength was permissible.

'He was attacked with a series of chakra blades, or so the report said. He then responded with...' her father stopped to think. The undercurrents of the conversation threatened to pull Raiku under and drown her. 'A rather brutal attack that... sucked the air from his lungs?' he asked himself, frowning. 'Or something of that nature,' he dismissed, finally finishing his tea. 'Were you aware your teammate was so proficient in Wind techniques?'

'I find it hard to believe he improved so rapidly,' she shrugged with carelessness she didn't feel. She looked down as her hand encountered plastic, having finished the cereal without noticing. She put it on the counter.

'Bin,' her father instructed disapprovingly. She obligingly pulled the lid to the bin up, turning her back as she disposed of the packet. She took the opportunity to release a sigh of worry, brow furrowing in concern. Daisukenojo used chakra blades? Daisukenojo knew what those were? Ryuu would use that technique on a teammate?

Ryuu had used that technique... at all?

She smoothed her face as she turned back around, wearing a cheerful smile. 'I'm impressed at their improvements,' she nodded.

Her father finished his newspaper, folding it up and setting it aside. He looked up at her, wearing a similar expression. He was, after all, the one who taught her her stock facial expressions. 'Would you like to visit him? I believe your other teammate is also there.'

'I suppose it would be... suspicious, if I didn't,' she said after some rather keen thought.

'Well of course,' her father said, grinning abruptly. 'Good thinking.'

'I'll see you later,' she said, tilting her head and creasing her eyes further. He smiled at her affectionately.

'Of course. I'll be here.'

Of course he would be, she reflected grimly, opening the door into the hall and making her way to the front door. He would be waiting there to ask, nonchalantly, about her day. He would always, always be casual and always be assessing. Her father loved her, because a father should love his daughter, but he was a Gairano, first and foremost. So was she.

She frowned when she realised, pulling on her sandals. She'd only thought of her reasons for going after she'd decided to go, and that was problematic. She leant back, absently playing with a sandal. This was less than ideal. She needed to withdraw from the situation emotionally and reassess her options. It was at roughly this point that she found herself standing on the dirt between the gates of the Compound, still holding her sandal.

She looked around surreptitiously, blushing faintly. She cleared her throat and slipped the sandal on, brushing herself off self-consciously. She squared her shoulders and nodded to herself. She was evidently- she caught her foot as it tried to step away, yanking it back into position.

 _Evidently_  she was more concerned than she'd bargained on. She set off down the slope at a casual pace, or as casual as someone could be while half-walking half-skidding down, jumping lightly off as the slope cut off abruptly and landing lightly on the ground in a shower of earth.

Raiku felt a curious jolt that didn't originate from the usual source of her jolts as she noticed there was no one there to greet her. She put her hands stubbornly in her pockets and set off down the street, casually nodding to the people she passed with an amiable expression on her face. The hospital was that- 'Enough of that!' she snapped to herself as a blue spark jumped between foot and sidewalk after a particularly quick step.

A nearby child gaped at her in horror.

Raiku froze in mortification, colour flooding her face. She beat a hasty retreat in the direction of the hospital, arriving at the double glass doors so quickly she checked the sidewalk behind her to make sure there were no scorch-marks. Satisfied there were none, she entered into a room of Rookie Genin.

She blinked, momentarily taken aback. To her supreme horror, Sakura waved at her. Her eyes were tired and vaguely bloodshot from what Raiku could see, and she sat on the chair in the lobby like she was afraid to move from it. 'Raiku... you're here to see your team?' she called, rubbing her eyes in a movement that belied her exhaustion.

'Yes...' Raiku said, stuck awkwardly in the doorway. She wanted to find Daisukenojo and she wanted to check on Ryuu, not to mention how badly she wanted to avoid talking to Sakura in general.

Sakura smiled weakly. 'Naruto's just... checking in on Lee,' she offered.

'I'm going to... I'm going to go and check on him when I'm up there,' Raiku responded, mask easily hiding her cringe. 'But I should...' she made a vague gesture towards the desk. 'Should go and check...'

'Yeah,' Sakura nodded quickly. 'Yeah, you should... I'll... see you later?'

Raiku nodded immediately, relieved at the escape. 'Definitely,' she lied.

Sakura looked relieved, but probably for a different reason. Raiku's suspicions were confirmed when she began to speak again.

'Raiku?' she called as Raiku made her way to the desk. Raiku paused mid-step, looking over at her with helpful puzzlement. 'I ...' she gave a self-conscious, but lovely smile. It was beaten, bruised and scratched to hell, but it lit up her face and made the new imperfections seem inconsequential. 'It's just that we haven't ever spoken really, so since we're both Rookie Genin, I thought you might like to get together some time?'

Rejection was bad. Accepting was catastrophic. Raiku opened her mouth to refuse, and something mean niggled at the back of her head. Sakura was smiling at her. Hopefully. No one ever smiled at her hopefully. People smiled at her awkwardly, self-consciously, spitefully and smugly. No one ever looked to a Gairano with hope. Her rejection died on her throat, and she gave her a smile. 'I think...' she said hesitantly. 'I think I'd like that.'

Sakura's smile spread sweetly. 'Thank you,' she said sincerely. 'I'll... see you around?'

'Sure,' Raiku smiled in response, glad the mask concealed her uncertainty. She gave an awkward nod and walked away with brief, jerky steps, stopping at the counter.  
Mayuko glowered up at her.

Raiku's uncertain, tentative and flawed smile vanished in favour of a bright and perfect one. 'Good morning Mayuko,' she greeted formally. 'Can you please tell me what room my teammate is in? As well as Rock Lee?'

They had an impromptu glare off, before Raiku paused and looked at her in feigned concern. 'Mayuko? Is there something wrong?'

The lowest of blows. Mayuko beamed up at her. 'No problem at all, Raiku!' she chirped. Chirping- the ultimate verbal defensive verb. 'Allow me to get that for you.'  
Raiku accepted a small slip of paper with two room numbers written on it in the clear, decisive hand of a nurse who was trying to dispose of someone annoying who they doubted the intelligence of. She leaned forward as Mayuko gestured for her to do so. 'If you could get your  _other_  teammate to cooperate with us, that would be good,' she hissed into her ear. Raiku nodded in understanding, straightening.

'I'll try, Mayuko,' she said, inclining her head. She turned and made her way to the stairs, checking the paper. Rock Lee was obviously in stable condition and was a substantial risk at this time in terms of Naruto interaction, while Daisukenojo was in an observation ward. She wondered what Ryuu had done to him and what he had done to Ryuu as she padded up the stairs until she reached the appropriate door, pushing it open silently and slipping into the plain white hallway. The sun streamed in, filtered only by clear glass and the windswept leaves on the expansive trees outside, the autumn foliage casting beautiful shaded light onto the walls and floor. Four doors on the right and two suspicious nurses later, she knocked quietly on a closed door.

'Daisuke?' she called quietly and waited for a response. When there was none she slowly slid it open, eyes widening with barely contained surprise as she saw what was inside the cheerful, sterile white room.

'I didn't mean to hurt him,' Ryuu rasped from his seat next to the bed, unable to meet her gaze. 'I don't know where the technique came from.' He let his head fall forward into faintly shaking hands, hiding his face from her eyes. 'I didn't mean to hurt him,' he repeated quietly.

Daisukenojo weakly let his head turn towards her, skin a pale, unhealthy blue that contrasted with her bright hair and freckles to make him look like some sort of extra-terrestrial creature. He managed to nod very slightly, breath rasping in and out of him.

Raiku edged closer, putting a hand on his uncertainly. 'Daisuke?' she whispered, eyes wide and concerned as they scanned his face.

His lips twitched feebly, in what she guessed was a gesture meant to be wry or reassuring. 'Ryuu,' she whispered, blinking slowly. 'Who needs enemies with friends like you?'  
After a moment Ryuu began to laugh hoarsely, sounding strained from his raw throat and shoulders shaking with what looked more like sobs than laughter. Daisukenojo's lips twitched again. He closed his eyes, forcing his head to turn back to Ryuu, who couldn't bring himself to look up. When he'd composed himself, he sighed. 'They said that my technique should wear off in a few days,' he said quietly, as though each word pained him. 'No... lasting damage.'

'That's good,' she said cheerfully, reaching forward to pat Daisukenojo on the forehead. He winced in exaggerated disgust and turned his head away a fraction.

'No, Gairano, it's not good!' Ryuu snapped, finally looking up. She managed not to flinch when the movement drew attention to a deep, clean cut on his chest, so deep it partially exposed bone. 'I'm using techniques I've never learned and I'm using them without ever wanting to! That is  _not. Good_.'

Raiku smiled, lifting her hand to rub the back of her head. 'I use things I don't want to all the time... and it would be a lot worse if I didn't stop it as much as I can. So shouldn't you just stop it as much as- that is completely disgusting,' she gagged, putting a hand over her mouth as Ryuu shifted again, revealing a long gash of equal depth stretching from his collarbone to his back, exposing a white expanse of bone with veins pulsing over it. 'Get some treatment!'

Ryuu snarled at her, but it lacked the animosity she imagined it would confront medics with. 'I mean it, Ryuu! Daisukenojo almost killed you too, so if he gets help so do you!' she said, setting her hands on her hips. 'Get help or I'll show you some of what I can do without wanting to!'

They glared at each other as a while, coloured shadows shifting gently over their faces as the tree outside the window swayed in the wind. Ryuu narrowed his eyes and lowered his gaze, looking away. 'Go get a nurse,' he muttered.

Daisukenojo's chest jerked- she started in dismay before realising he was trying to laugh, falling short of the minimum oxygen requirement for vocalisation.

'Alright,' she nodded, giving Daisukenojo another pat on the forehead before she backed out. Left with the sounds of the leaves rustling outside and the faint beeping of the heart monitor, Ryuu and Daisukenojo failed to look at each other.


	22. glass in stairwells

'I hope you're happy,  _Raiku_ ,' Ryuu hissed as the medic bent over him, hand glowing as it hovered over a particularly gruesome slice. ' _So_  happy.'

'I am, thank you,' she said primly, sitting on the seat on the other side of Daisukenojo's bed, legs drawn up to sit cross-legged. 'My teammates are going to recover well! Of course I'm happy.'

Daisukenojo's lips tilted upwards, eyes narrowing at Ryuu.

'Shut the hell up,' he growled, reaching across and pulling the oxygen mask up and letting it jerk back to his face with a snap. Daisukenojo winced, eyes watering in pain. Raiku rolled her eyes at the medic, who shot her a similarly exasperated look.

'You really ripped some sizeable chunks out of your friend here, Hatori,' the medic criticised as the slice began to close. 'You may have deserved being put in here.'

'Luck,' Ryuu said, glaring over at the redhead invalid. 'Sheer luck.'

'Got the drop on him?' Raiku whispered to Daisukenojo, who nodded wearily. She grinned as Ryuu growled at her, accepting the knitting of his flesh without complaint or flinching. She could admire that sort of pain tolerance, given that she had none.

'My hand seals began to channel a chakra type I was unfamiliar with,' Ryuu muttered, glaring at her as though he could hear every word. 'I had to quit mid-seal, and when I did so, he attacked.'

Raiku blinked in surprise. 'Sneaky.'

'The next time it got away from me, I couldn't afford to stop,' he said, glowering over at Daisukenojo. 'Which is why we're  _here_.'

'Your chakra blades sound very impressive,' Raiku said to Daisukenojo sincerely. She tilted her head curiously. 'Was it a modification of your mother's medical chakra scalpel technique?

He nodded weakly. Raiku beamed. 'That's excellent, Daisuke!' He smiled slightly in response, eyelids slowly drifting closed. The medic glanced over to the various monitors attached to him, quick and assessing gaze easily taking in the relevant information.

'Gairano, you may want to go take a walk,' he said gently, removing his hand from the thin, angry red line that marked what had once been a horrific gash. 'Hatori is about to undergo another round of treatment, and I don't think he would want you to see the effects.'

Raiku looked over to Ryuu reflexively, brow creasing in concern. He gave a small nod. She smiled. 'Alright,' she agreed, sliding her legs off the chair and rising to her feet. 'I should go check on Lee anyway. Should I stay away for long?'

'No more than half an hour,' the medic guessed, moving to the clean cut through Ryuu's eyebrow.

'Thanks for getting my face, asshole,' Ryuu grumbled to the increasingly unconscious redhead.

Raiku smiled at him happily. 'I think the scar makes your face more interesting,' she commented, nodding to herself. 'Less like Sasuke!'

'You thought I looked like that overly emotional bastard?' Ryuu asked in a low, dangerous voice.

'You're less pretty and more handsome,' she offered awkwardly. '...Now,' she added guiltily.

'Run. Run now.'

'Running!' she confirmed cheerfully, saluting with two fingers and sauntering out the door. She slid it shut behind her, exhaling heavily to release her tension. Ryuu's symptoms were characteristic of a Drama Rank Three- the maximum rank for someone who wasn't Naruto or one of his close friends. Mysterious, uncontrollable techniques, strange and borderline traumatic events as well as scars that enhanced rather than detracted from attractiveness. She'd have to inform her family, and get him moved up in the Ranks from his original Two. Daisukenojo could be moved from borderline Two to One again, which should balance it out nicely. She smiled to herself faintly, hand still resting on the door. At least they were both alright, though Ryuu seemed more frightened than Daisukenojo. She could empathise with the fear of one's own capabilities, though it had been a while since she herself had felt it. He would learn to deal with it- he really was strong. Daisukenojo's current state of debilitation would serve to give him motivation to learn control, as she had failed to do.

She nodded to herself resolutely, fishing the paper with Lee's room number out of her pocket and checking it again. He was a floor up, in the more restive ward for the patients that required less paranoid observation and more time for only casually attended recovery. She wondered who he had had to fight, and decided not to ask him.

No need to prompt revelations or bonding, no sir.

She made her way back to the relative darkness of the stairwell, eyes casting a gentle, illuminating glow over the walls as she padded up the steps. A low, gentle sound issued from somewhere below, and after a moment's consideration she labeled it as air from the air conditioning escaping through a bad seal on a door. She pulled on the door handle to the next floor, yanking harder as it refused to budge. 'Come on,' she muttered to herself, continuing to pull. 'Don't do this...'

Unsurprisingly and rather rudely, the door refused to open.

She sighed, turning around and walking quietly down the stairs to the other floor. She'd been gone roughly... two minutes, leaving about twenty eight until she could return to a hopefully less incensed Ryuu and a conscious Daisukenojo. She reached her own door and pushed down on the handle, trying to pull it open. More surprisingly, it gave a pathetic groan and refused to budge, only shifting slightly in the door frame. Raiku sighed heavily, picturing a skeleton lying in the stairwell until hospital maintenance could finally be bothered to do something about it. That would be her luck, really.

She crossed to the banister and leaned over to check that the stairwell below was clear, squinting into the dark that the windows on the top floor high above failed to illuminate. She sighed heavily, hanging her head briefly before turning and making for the stairs to the lowest floor.

'Where were you, Raiku?' she imitated to herself. 'Oh, I was just stuck in a stairwell.

'Well why didn't you just escape, Raiku? What kind of kunoichi are you?

'Obviously? A pretty poor one,' she muttered to herself in conclusion as her feet touched the cold tiles of the lowest floor. She slipped slightly, grabbing the banister for support. She looked around self-consciously, smoothing her hair ineffectually to cover an embarrassment no one was there to see. She sighed yet again, shoulders slumping. 'I am the worst ninja ever.'

The hissing sound grew louder as she crossed the tiles to the door, confirming her suspicions. 'AHAaaand it's jammed,' she began in exclamation and ended in grumble. She let her head fall forward to thunk onto the wood, hoping someone outside would hear. No real kunoichi would get into a situation like this. Clearly this was karma kicking her in the face. A  _real_  kunoichi would simply put chakra on her feet, walk up to the window and climb to freedom. Or better yet, just jump up.  _Raiku_ , who was probably  _not_  a real kunoichi, would have to wait for maintenance. And yes, she could jump up and yes, she could walk up. But the fact of the matter was, quite simply, that she didn't feel like it at the moment. She could wait for thirty minutes then escape, given that it was relatively peaceful in the stairwell and the stairs themselves bore little risk of Naruto Encounter. She exhaled in relief and turned her back to the door, sliding down into a sitting position.

Ah. Freedom from Naruto.

The hissing stopped abruptly and she concluded she must be blocking the hole in the seal, closing her eyes to better help her relax. The hissing picked up accordingly, changing to a higher frequency. Raiku frowned slightly, shifting to try and block it again. Shortly after this shift something soft and rank with blood slid up to press on her masked mouth, provoking an immediate and oddly mild response. Her eyes flew open, arms coming up to feel her face. She pulled a hand away when the substance gave but the pressure didn't alleviate, widening her eyes to increase the range of light and trying not to squint counter-productively. Her hand was shoved roughly back until the back of it slammed into the door, jerking so abruptly her shoulder gave an alarming twinge. The brightness of her eyes shot up until the eerie blue glow reached several feet away, still failing to show her would-be attacker. She kept her other hand out trouble to stop it from suffering the same fate as the other, trying desperately to remove her glove without drawing attention to the hand or using anything but her straining fingers and the floor. She stubbornly refused to let the sounds at the back of her throat escape, shoving as much power as she could into her eyes until sparks threatened to escape. The floor and the rough grains lying on it scraped the gradually exposed skin. The hand against the other cracked slightly as the sand pressing into it shoved down harder, sending a steady stream of pain up her arm.

Sand. Why was it  _always_  sand?

She jerked her head up, trying to free her mouth long enough to force out a question as the waves of blue light eventually revealed a familiar, pale face. In the pale blue light his hair looked a strange, purplish shade of brown, eyes reflecting the light back at her eerily. No reflection could hide the open animosity, or the first smile she'd ever seen on Gaara's face.

It was more akin to Ryuu's displays of aggression than Daisukenojo's open, bright one or her own fake, distracting ones. It promised her unpleasant things and nothing else, despite being little more than a contemptuous curl of his lip.  
'You're weak,' he told her in a low, dark voice. He crouched amidst the slithering sands, perfectly still in contrast to the continuous shifts. With a particularly painful and unnatural twist, Raiku's hand was finally free of its leather prison. She slowly, cautiously drew it back to her side, staring at him with wide eyes.

'It would be easy,' escaped him in a low hiss. 'So... easy...'

Raiku panicked and threw her hand up, a strangled sound forced from her throat as electricity surged out of it with almost protective urgency, slamming into the wall of sand that instantly rose to defend him. Once the flash had cleared, Gaara's distorted face glared at her through a misshapen and transparent wall of flawed glass, the melted sand slowly oozing onto the floor.

Raiku's only free hand was free no longer, crushed back into the door with agonising force by the wrist, the sand carefully avoiding her glowing skin. Gaara shifted forward slightly, eyes narrowing hatefully. 'Are you still glad to see me?' he asked contemptuously. Raiku ruefully thought about how  _Sakura_  would never have this problem.

The sand shifted, lowering on her face slightly and pressing harder on her windpipe.

'Well?' he demanded. 'Are you still glad to see me,  _Raiku_?'

Raiku coughed hoarsely, breath coming in wheezes. 'Sure,' she forced out. 'But the sand... is not as ... thrilling.'

In her defence, Gaara really was ruthlessly pretty.

It just wasn't fair.

'It sucks...' she wheezed before she or the sand could stop her. 'That you're... prettier... than me.'

Gaara's expression didn't change.

'Joke,' she added before the sand mercifully covered her mouth again, probably to stop her foot from landing in it as it so persistently tried to do. The Gairano part of her brain nodded in approval of this remarkably undramatic death, while a more incensed and possibly leather and mesh-clad part stepped up to the plate and closed its eyes, rubbing its figurative hands together. Quietly, the world exploded in a flash of white and a surge of intense and localised heat, restrained in a way she would never be able to consciously achieve. Raiku struggled out of a pool of rapidly solidifying glass with a gasp, clawing her way out of the thick ooze as the light faded from the area, sucked into her skin.

'Yeah,' she panted, on her hands and knees in the middle of the sticky, unpleasant puddle. 'Freaky is good. Good freak,' she congratulated herself. 'Covered in glass. But alive!' she panted to Gaara with a relieved smile, right up until she realised he was standing, unscathed, not far from her and probably still fully intending to crush and kill her.

She slumped wearily, dropping her head. 'You're not a very good friend,' she sighed. 'But I suppose it gets better with practice.'

'I don't have friends,' Gaara told her coldly, turning away with grace that, given the  _giant gourd_ , surprised her. He said nothing for a moment and simply stood with his back to her. 'I'll kill you one day,' he told her without looking back, and vanished in a (smallish) swirl of sand.

Raiku collapsed into the glass in relief, letting her head fall back and keep the current running through. 'Okay,' she sighed. 'He'll kill me one day. Okay.' Hysterical laughter bubbled up in her throat, escaping in something that sounded like a hiccupping sob more than a laugh. 'But...' she managed, tears of relief welling up in her eyes. 'It wasn't so easy to kill me, huh?'

The next time she tried the door to Rock Lee's floor, it opened easily. Somehow she'd known it would.

 

 

 

 

 

'What the  _hell_  happened to you!?' Ryuu demanded as she trudged back through the door after a highly eventful trip to see someone who didn't even have the good grace to be conscious. Daisukenojo's colour was better- slightly less blue- and he managed to widen his eyes when he saw her.

Raiku's expression was flat. 'I fell in the stairwell,' she said darkly.

Ryuu moved to stand, eyes narrowed. She held up a hand to stop him. 'I'm going to have a shower,' she announced. 'And I'm taking your change of clothes!'

Ryuu growled, low in his throat. Raiku rolled her eyes. 'It's that or take this stuff off and barbecue everyone! Is that what you want?!' He paused, taken aback either at the promise of relentless violence or partial nudity.

'Nice scar,' she added brightly, pointing at the new, thin white scar that cut through his eyebrow at the exact point at which it curved sharpest. Ryuu didn't respond, just settling back in his seat. He reached for the small black bag beside his chair leg and tossed it over grudgingly, scowling.

'Thanks Ryuu!' she said, saluting cheerfully and trudging to the small, inconspicuous shower door. As it slid shut behind her and the water started, Ryuu tilted his head. He was far from stupid. She wasn't wearing both gloves, and removing them was one of her last, close contact 'techniques'. He silently loped out of the room, not bothering to inform Daisukenojo of where he was going, confident that the shorter boy would assume correctly.


	23. red, black and expendable poison

'So the bastard finally went home?' Daisukenojo asked, sitting cross legged at the head of his bed, oxygen mask exchanged for a thin tube taped under his nose. Raiku, sitting in a similar fashion on the other end, nodded and put down a four of Hearts from the half-deck of cards in her hands.

'He said he'd had just about enough of us in the past two days,' she sighed, laying down four cards grudgingly as he put down a king. Daisukenojo collected the cards up and added them to the bottom of his own half-deck, smirking faintly. The effect was somewhat ruined by the faint wheeze that made her want to hand him some sort of cough medicine. 'That,' she admitted. 'And I may have burnt his hair. A little.'

Daisukenojo snorted in amusement, resulting in her immediate flush. 'Stop laughing at me!' she scolded, sending a card flicking through the air to hit him in the face. 'It was an accident! And then he had the nerve to trip me over when I tried to run! I hate it when he does that!'

It was impossible for him to be able to catch her. And he always, always did. Each time she took a step to flee he would know, and not even perfect speed would stop the air from seizing around her legs, withholding from her lungs or from her own power dragging her into one of his traps.

He always caught her.

She'd known he would the moment he'd said it. Ryuu never lied. He bent the truth and he evaded it masterfully, viewing it only as a picture that could be deconstructed for easy subterfuge. If he could be persuaded to talk for long enough it was possible to see the pieces of the truth and how they fit together, with him sitting in the middle in his web of almost-lies. It was the one weakness he refused to part with. He never lied.

She put down a jack and won the pile, tucking it in place under her own thin stack with a quiet smile. Daisukenojo groaned, looking mournfully at the cards. 'There go my aces,' he muttered ruefully.

Raiku flashed the jack of Spades and a wide grin. 'One jack can win the game.'

'You always cling to that card,' he said, rolling his eyes. 'It's the one card I can never win off you.'

She shrugged carelessly, shuffling her cards. 'I have an affinity with Spades,' she said easily, putting down a miscellaneous number card. 'They're my thing.'

'You know they symbolise death?' Daisukenojo asked dryly, putting down a queen of Diamonds.

Raiku smiled faintly, producing (to his profound disgust), yet another jack. 'Yeah, well,' she said eventually, gathering the cards up. 'I'm not really suited to the red suits.'

'Why?' he asked, producing his own jack of Hearts, the only jack he'd managed to keep, and placing it over her jack of Spades, so close to victory he could smell it.

She shrugged, drawing a queen of Clubs out and placing it casually over his jack of Hearts, as though she hadn't just ruined his best chance of winning. 'Red's not my colour.' She looked up briefly, smiling at him. 'Though, red suits you, Daisuke.'

He rolled his eyes. 'Ha ha,' he said, perfectly droll. 'Enough with the hair jokes.'

She just smiled, picking up the last few cards and shuffling the completed deck. 'Again?' she offered.

'What are you playing?' Ryuu asked from where he leaned against the doorframe, a piece of grass casually sticking out of his mouth and hands tucked into his pockets. He'd gone and changed his clothes and obviously showered, hair and skin still slightly damp. She wondered if his mother minded how infrequently he came home.

'Beat your neighbour,' Raiku said, holding up the deck. 'Would you like to play?'

'What do I get if I win?' he asked, narrowing his eyes shrewdly.

'You won't win,' Daisukenojo snorted, breaking into a brief fit of coughing. 'She always wins.'

'Oh?' he asked with an arrogant tilt of his head. She smiled at him cheerfully, pulling a card from the middle of the deck and turning it over to reveal her beloved jack of Spades. Without tragic romance and fraught character arcs, Gairano had a lot of time for card tricks. And scrabble.

'Pretty much,' she said, still smiling. Ryuu just looked at her for a moment, and for a brief and uncomfortable second she felt oddly ill at ease but for the card in her hand, before he grabbed the chair she had been using previously, turning it to straddle it backwards and resting his arms on the top.

'Hurry up and deal,' he said, looking at her too directly for her to really be comfortable. She nodded obligingly, shuffling the cards again.

'Which suits suit Ryuu, toaster?' Daisukenojo asked, resting his chin on his hand, watching her fingers with a bored expression. She knew he found the whole hospital stay idea to be so incredibly dull that he'd considered escaping, hence the card games.

She glanced over at Ryuu, watching her through heavy lidded golden eyes, chin resting on his arms. Oh, Ryuu was red. Raiku wasn't the expected black sheep, but these two were mostly definitely red. Even if they weren't Main Characters, they still had the potential to get involved. They were still there, they were still part of things.

She smiled. 'Red. But he's more Diamonds than you are.' Ryuu had sharper edges.

But they were both still so very, very red. Gairano were black. The most unlikely of black sheep. Ironically also the colour of Plots, which her family treated as one enormous inside joke.

Daisukenojo scowled. 'Are you saying he's worth more!?'

'No!' she denied hastily.

'So he's worth  _less_ ,' Daisukenojo smirked.

'No!' she exclaimed, leaning away from the glaring Ryuu. 'He's just different! Different! Stop putting words in my mouth!'

Daisukenojo puffed his chest out with masterfully concealed difficulty. 'Yeah! Totally worth more than  _Ryuu_! Thanks, toaster!'

Raiku lunged forward, dragged back by Ryuu by her underarms. She dug her hands into the blanket to stop him from pulling her towards him, murder written on his face. 'Stop framing me!'

Daisukenojo just laughed as Ryuu started to- cheerfully, as he no longer bothered to hide his tendencies as a sadist- strangle her.

 

 

 

 

 

'So why is it?' Mura asked, sitting next to her on the wall as the sun began to set. The wind carried the sweet air to her nose and she inhaled obligingly, wondering why the air was always clearer on the walls of the Compound, sitting next to the child who ruined her life. 'Why is it red doesn't suit you?'

She never had gotten the joke. From what she'd heard, Mura had never gotten a lot of things.

Raiku shrugged as the wind ruffled her hair, sending small, brief sparks from the rough strands.

'Because you can't suit both.'

'And I?' Mura asked.

'I guess that means you suit red, Mura,' Raiku said simply, as the sky faded to dark purple behind them and dark red before them. Mura wasn't like them, not really. That was the problem.

'And you?'

'I suit black.'

'What does that mean?' Mura pressed.

'It means,' Raiku said eventually, as the first stars began to quietly glow in the sky above them. 'That one day… I'll probably kill you.'

'Will you kill your red teammates? For that and all this?' Mura asked, letting her head fall back so she could look at the stars. She still hated them. Raiku supposed she could understand that.

Raiku shook her head, smiling faintly.

'Why?'

Raiku's eyes traced the last dregs of sunlight as they flickered out of life on the horizon, ignoring the stars. She'd seen enough in the skies of the Wind Country, where Mura would never go. 'Probably because…' she said eventually. 'They'll kill me first if it comes to it.'

'Because you're a Gairano and they aren't?' Because they could be part of the story, and she couldn't?

Raiku shrugged.

Mura's head fell forward, eyes bearing the same hunted expression they had worn when Raiku had first found and retrieved her. 'Because we're expendable,' she told her quietly, bitterly. 'We're poison.'

Raiku shot her a wry grin, eyes flashing in the fading light. Red. Black. Mura really had never gotten the joke.

'Play cards with me?'


	24. traumatising ramen and sad chopsticks

There would be a month between the preliminaries and the real Third Exam, and a week after his agonisingly painful defeat, Daisukenojo had been released into the loving arms of friends and family. Well, friends and family with the exception of Raiku. Raiku wasn't there, because Raiku was in hell.

Well, she conceded, staring grimly down into her bowl of ramen as the bustling chef and his daughter conversed happily with the blonde Drama Magnet sitting not two seats from her, at least it was hell with food provided.

That morning had started much like any other, with a gratuitously large breakfast and her father's envious eyes demanding to know where she put all that food without becoming morbidly obese. After that she'd settled in for a quiet day at home- Yamada was busy putting Ryuu and Daisukenojo through the most harrowing punishment he could think of. He hadn't been willing to 'emotionally destroy' her with details, but it involved his wife and the tallest tree in Konoha. After that, she hadn't asked many questions. It was at roughly midday her day started to decline, and decline spectacularly.

The walls shook. A picture came loose and the glass of the frame shattered as it hit the ground, crushed further by a falling chair. 'Code Blue!' her father yelled over the quaking, picking up a broom on one hand and a scroll in the other. 'Run for it!' He made for their not-so-hidden room, cursing loudly over the crashing and shuddering, kicking a fallen door out of his way.

On her part, she leaped over the debris that had formerly been furniture, staggering to the doorway leading out of their house to try and remove herself from the sound long enough to remember what a Code Blue entailed. And as the quaking stopped and the shaking dropped, she opened the door and remembered, vividly, what a Code Blue was as she stared into the very blue but not quite as blue as her own gaze of Uzumaki Naruto.

He grinned at her. She stared at him, mute with shock and a large, icy dose of horror. 'Hey Raiku!' he said, giving her a cheesy grin. 'We're here to take you to lunch!'

Raiku could only stare. '…"we"?' she managed eventually as she clutched the doorframe for support.

'Get out of the way, Naruto!' a very familiar voice snapped, and a feminine white hand rudely shoved Naruto to the side. Sakura sent her a bereaved smile as Naruto cleared the way for Raiku to see her, rubbing the back of her head awkwardly. 'I'm so sorry, Raiku, but he just wouldn't quit once he found out where I was going…'

'This is because of the bet, isn't it,' Raiku interrupted, expression flat.

'Yes,' Sakura said, hanging her head in shame. 'I'm sorry.'

Raiku sighed, looking back over her shoulder to a deeply traumatised father, brandishing a broom out of sight of both of the guests. 'I'll be back later, Dad!' she called. He instantly dropped the broom, clasping his hands together in a pleading gesture. She shot him a murderous look and slammed the door behind her. 'Let's go!' she said bravely, squaring thin shoulders.

And that in and of itself, would have been alright. Two people for lunch, even if one of those people was Naruto, were okay. Even if the Gairano part of her shrieked loudly and flailed in terror like Raiku so often did herself, all other parts could handle it.

It was what had come after that that was worse.

Raiku poked her cooling ramen with a sad, sad chopstick.

Oh yes. So much worse.

They'd made their way down the incline, Sakura and Naruto managing to do so with far more grace than she ever had, despite the fact she'd been doing it her whole life, before they started towards the downtown area.

'So, Raiku,' Sakura had said as they walked in vaguely awkward silence. 'How's your teammate? Daisukenojo, right?'

'Yeah,' Raiku confirmed, sticking her hands in her pockets. 'And he's fine. But he's really annoyed that Ryuu managed to get one over on him.' She rolled her eyes, exchanging knowing looks with Sakura. 'He's never going to let it go.'

'Sounds like Naruto and Sasuke-kun,' Sakura sighed, earning an indignant cry from her blonde teammate.

'I'm much better than that bastard!' Naruto exclaimed, puffing his chest out proudly. 'You just watch! I'm going to kick his ass one day!'

'You never will!' Sakura snorted, turning her nose up at him.

'I'm sure you will,' Raiku grinned despite herself, leaning forward to nod across at him. Naruto blinked in surprise and blushed faintly, giving her a thumbs-up and a radiant smile. It was at roughly that point she realised she sounded like she was choosing to believe in him, while she simply knew it to be true. The Plot alone told her that Naruto would not only defeat Sasuke but go on to greater heights and she was just acknowledging it.

But then... he couldn't see it, really.

It occured to her with a sudden, vivid clarity that ... life could be really  _hard_  if you couldn't read the patterns. How could Naruto know? He had to go on faith. She'd known it intellectually, sure, but... A grudging respect rose despite her Gairano instincts, which she carefully ignored. You couldn't see Plots if you weren't a Gairano- without that narrative fail-field, you ... had nothing but yourself.

It struck her, for a brief moment, that ...

They really were  _different._

She hurriedly masked her dismay at her sudden shift in worldview with a cough, studiously ignoring the irate look Sakura was sending her.

She narrowed her eyes slightly as she turned back to the road ahead, annoyed with herself for daring to have a dramatic epiphany at the worst possible time.

_Slip 1._

She broke into a cold sweat.

'That makes you as much of an idiot as Naruto,' Sasuke said contemptuously from her left. Raiku shrieked, dancing a few steps away and clutching a hand to her suddenly panicked heart.

'Don't DO that!' she said, pointing at him accusingly. 'Everyone does that to me and it's  _not funny_!'

'Like hell it's not!' Naruto laughed and was sent a barely concealed smirk by the Uchiha as a reward.

'Good morning Sasuke-kun,' Sakura said cheerfully. Raiku blinked in surprise, and wondered when Sakura's voice had gotten so high. And  _kun_? 'I thought Kakashi was taking you for extra training?'

'He was called to the Hokage,' Sasuke replied in a way reminiscent of Ryuu. 'We get back to it tomorrow.'

'I don't see why  _you_  get extra training, bastard,' Naruto muttered. Sasuke ignored him pointedly, earning a low growl.

Raiku discreetly tried to edge away. This was not good. This was so very, very  _not good_. She had to leave, and ensure it never happened again. Ever. She made it all of two metres before Sakura got a hold of her sleeve, not quite pulling her back but holding firmly enough to catch her attention.

'Raiku, please don't let them scare you off!' she said in a way too close to pleading for Raiku to be comfortable. Raiku cringed slightly, hunching her shoulders self-consciously and guiltily as Sakura's bright green eyes shone imploringly. Those same eyes were also vaguely annoyed, but that was easily overlooked. Raiku narrowed her own eyes at her slightly, shrewdly. She shouldn't feel bad. One pink haired girl shouldn't be able to make her feel bad. It had to be because they both had spectacularly unimaginative names. Had to be.

'I think I should come back another time,' she began reluctantly, cut off as soon as her sentence's meaning became intelligible. Naruto seized her other arm, linking it with his and turning towards the corner.

'Don't let Sasuke-bastard throw you off, Raiku! We'll go to Ichiraku and he'll go off and make brood-babies with the Hyuuga jerk,' he grinned, pulling a face at Sasuke over his shoulder. Raiku cut off her own brief laugh, hiding it in cough and biting her own tongue.

'Brood-babies,' she managed, almost going cross-eyed with the effort it took not to laugh. Naruto shot her a wicked grin and managed to ignore Sakura's vile glare, to say nothing of the truly evil one being sent his way from Sasuke, trailing behind them.

Raiku's sad, sad chopstick joined its partner next to the bowl as the four watched them her like hawks, only occasionally bothering with an obviously fake conversation. If she'd known when Sakura said she wanted to 'see her more', she meant her  _whole team_ thought she was really damn weirdand would  _go with her_  to see Raiku, she would have refused. Hopeful, sparkling eyes or not, she would have refused and kept her damn sanity. Hell, they'd met their team leader on the way and he was only  _too happy_  to show up and mooch off their hospitality.

At the moment Sakura sat on the stool to her right, eating her ramen with a long-suffering look. She hated ramen, or so Raiku had gathered. Which made this restaurant a somewhat odd choice, but she would have been left with the same problem in any case, so she didn't particularly care.

And now Kakashi sat on her left and Sasuke sat on  _his_  left, leaving Raiku smack-dab in the middle of Drama central, to ferment in her misery. She sighed again, looking down at her food. She couldn't even eat it, because she second she lifted her chopsticks four pairs of eyes- and that  _wasn't_  including the damn owners of the place – looked at her expectantly, waiting for her mask to come down. Since Raiku's tragically fast metabolism demanded she eat her own body weight in food regularly, sitting here with a bowl of ramen and no way to eat it was a nightmare.

She frowned slightly. In fact, she thought she may have had a nightmare like that once.

'It's weird,' Naruto announced, and her, Sakura and Kakashi turned to look at him. Sasuke, true to form, ignored him. He shrugged as they looked at him, pointing and moving his finger between Raiku and Kakashi. 'It's like looking into the  _future_.'

'You think I'm a boy?!' Raiku asked in horror.

Sakura shot the mortified Naruto a vile glare. This was not how she envisioned getting to know the famously shy and mysterious Gairano. Not what she envisioned at all, and it had to be Naruto's fault. Naruto went red. 'No! Not that part,' he said hastily, raising his hands defensively. 'It's just the hair, and the masks! You're pretty much the same! But,' he added with obviously feigned nonchalance. 'You could just… take the masks off.'

Raiku slowly turned around to look awkwardly up at Kakashi, whose mildly amused gaze was fixed on her. 'If I'd known,' Raiku said awkwardly, cringing and too frightened to break his gaze, 'this was a ploy to get my mask off me and to compare me to your team leader… I would have refused to come, Sakura.'

Sakura took a moment to look away from Naruto, flushing in realisation and embarrassment. 'No! No, that wasn't my plan at all!'

'It seems like it was,' Raiku said faintly, moving her head slightly. To her supreme horror, his eyes stayed on her.

'Raiku, I'm sorry for my  _idiot_  of a teammate,' Sakura said, gaze essentially stabbing Naruto, pinning him in woeful place. 'I meant it when I said I wanted to get to know you better,' she added sincerely.

'Come to think of it, I'm pretty boring,' Raiku said cagily, shifting on her seat. 'Maybe I should go, before you find out first hand and hate me?'

She got the distinct impression that the leader of Team Kakashi was laughing at her and quietly swore revenge as Sakura grinned. 'Sure,' she said lightly. 'Boring, right? So why don't you tell me how you managed to follow Ino-pig's team for a whole day without getting caught?'

'By acting like a spider,' she answered evasively.

Sakura raised an eyebrow.

'You sorta look like one,' Naruto agreed, earning him a swift kick that sent him flying off his stool.

Raiku's eyes widened. Sakura was even more violent than Kankuro, and that was saying something. Next she'd be asking to play "mercy".

'She does  _not_ ,' Sakura hissed, looming over Naruto threateningly. Raiku looked down at herself critically.

'I think I sort of do,' she admitted to the surprise of everyone present. 'But it's better than being called toaster.'

'"Toaster"?' Sasuke echoed mockingly.

She narrowed her eyes, gripping her melancholic chopsticks. 'Toaster.'

'You're a total freak, Raiku,' Naruto said and stood, grinning at her. 'Total freak!' Sakura's hands clenched into ominous fists again.

'Probably,' Raiku said amiably, creasing her eyes at him. Sakura seemed torn between the instinctive urge to defend her guest and Raiku's obvious dismissal of offence- she settled on stamping on Naruto's foot.

As Naruto yelped in pain, Raiku took the opportunity to eat her ramen, scarfing down the now unpleasantly lukewarm concoction and yanking her mask back up. A movement in her peripheral make her turn to look at Kakashi adjusting his where it lay over his nose, bowl as empty as hers. He creased his eyes at her, receiving an almost identical one in return.

They were actually eerily similar, she reflected with no small amount of depression.

The daughter of the owner leaned forward towards her across the divider, beckoning conspiratorially with a friendly light shining in her eyes. Raiku blinked and leaned forward curiously, tilting her head to hear what the woman was going to say better.

'Don't worry about what they say about you,' the woman winked. Raiku frowned in confusion, before understanding dawned. Of course she would have been watching, would have seen her face and drawn her own conclusions. The woman leaned back and took her bowl with her, passing it to her father cheerfully and continuing on as if she hadn't said anything. The question then remained: what did they say about her? Or her face, more specifically.

Naruto whined in protest as he caught sight of the empty places in front of Raiku and Kakashi, sagging in disappointment. 'We missed it!' he complained to Sakura, who went bright red.

'Shut up, idiot!' she hissed, cuffing him over the back of the head. 'You're going to make her self-conscious!'

'I already am, and have resolved to never go anywhere with you guys ever again,' Raiku announced. Deep into an intense argument over something she decided she didn't want to know about, neither of them heard her. She sighed wearily, rubbing her temples to try and alleviate her growing headache. 'It's cool, I'm not even here. Please continue with your conversation.'

When they did, she sighed yet again. 'In fact,' she added, 'I may just go and request a restraining order! Right after I go and saw hi to Gaara, who apparently would like to kill me, having tried and failed already.'

She waited expectantly for a response, deflating when there was none.

'All this,' she fabricated, resorting to making various gestures to emphasis her point as she continued to talk to herself, 'this would be shortly after I go and profess my undying love for the perhaps overly loquacious Hyuuga Neji, whose struggles with fate I can empathise with. We will have eight children.'

This earned a snort from Sasuke, but no other audible reply.

Each of her comments half true, she was rapidly running out of things to say. Actually, she considered, this was helping to get things off her chest. She should confront Gaara and it was hard to avoid mentioning the attempt on her life in public, and Neji's struggles with fate were something she could feel for, though his were far, far less successful.

Clearly she didn't actually bear any sort of undying love for him. Or Gaara, while she was on the subject.

'Leaving,' she added to the bickering too, sliding off her stool. 'Thanks for the ramen and unfavourable comparisons? Thanks and I am leaving.'

She took a few wary steps back and found it safe to continue, immediately turning and beating a hasty retreat. When her meagre senses couldn't pick up Naruto's aura any more she sagged in relief, releasing a tension she wasn't aware she had been enduring.

It was the first time Raiku had agreed on anything with her family for a while. She was screwed.


	25. lonerfreaks

The next time she came into contact with any the others involved in the Chuunin Exam Preliminaries, it was roughly a week later and raining. It was also despite her best efforts.

She stared up at the dark, mottled sky, and frowned. Not that anyone could tell, given the mask, but she knew and that was what counted. It wasn't enough that having decided to avoid Team Kakashi, Team Kakashi was suddenly everywhere, no. It wasn't enough that suddenly every genin and some Chuunin were making bets about her face and her father was pissed beyond all reason, no. Now the Genematrix had decided that the resident electrokinetic of Konoha should come out of the closet. It had to be that. There was no other explanation.

The first sign had been the day of her unfortunate 'Team Kakashi and Ramen' incident- Raiku was largely as unimaginative as her father- and had been when she'd ducked into an alley to avoid their attempts to find her. She'd pressed to the cool bricks to try and minimise her visibility as the three Genin had walked quickly down the street, their pink-haired member calling her name. With a sharp groan and snap, Raiku had found herself both drenched by the broken pipe above and glowing. Ordinarily inconvenient, she was now freezing and in serious danger of being discovered. With a frustrated (and moist) cry, she'd darted up the walls and away as quickly as she could, until she found herself tapping pathetically at Ryuu's highly displeased window in a desperate request for assistance. After all, she couldn't wander around glowing.

Ryuu was, understandably, less than enthused at her appearance.

The second sign was even less subtle. A sprinkler gone haywire, as she'd clung to the underside of a store overhang some perilous three feet above the unsuspecting Team Kurenai, who she was also trying to avoid. The store's flower display had gone from being mildly refreshed to drowning in a matter of seconds, and there was now a large, Raiku shaped blackened part of the overhang.

Ryuu was by then, somewhat annoyed at her continuous visits.

The third sign (and without a doubt, the most obvious) was this one.

It was raining.

She shook her fist at the sky, taking care not to extend her hand beyond the shelter of the windowsill she was momentarily contorted to fit under, some scant feet above the streets of Konoha on the external wall of a building unfortunate enough to be near her when the downpour started. She lurched threateningly and slammed her hand back to brace herself against the wood again, currently bent double with fingers straining to hold her in place. The shelter was enough to make her stay unmoving as the Plot scurried up the wall around her ankles, tugging at her lightly.

This wasn't fun. She had horrible, horrible pain building in her twisted lower back and her fingers felt at dangerous risk of snapping under the pressure of her entire body weight. This couldn't be worse.

This could not be worse.

And as thunder rumbled and the clouds lit up in brief flicker, she could only conclude that she'd asked for that one. She groaned quietly to herself, closing her eyes and trying to pretend she was somewhere- anywhere- else. At home?

Her lips twitched downwards slightly.

In Sand?

The flickering expression turned to a distinct sign of displeasure as she concluded there was actually nowhere she actually enjoyed being that she had herself gone to, except perhaps Ryuu and Daisukenojo's houses. Daisukenojo's was a close second to Ryuu's despite the constant noise: she loved the combined warmth of some eight loud, unpretentious people and the furniture worn from years of relentless affectionate battle, the smell of cooking that had pervaded the walls themselves and the faint medicinal smell of his smiling mother. If it weren't for the unending envy, she would never leave.

But Ryuu's house was something else entirely. Years of exposure to the blooming, beautiful sadist had had a curious effect on the air- left to itself, any and all air in Ryuu's proximity would change according to his preferences in a way oddly reminiscent to another elemental relationship she was stubbornly refusing to acknowledge. As a result, the air inside his home was of perfect temperature, and saturated with perfect serenity. Because wherever Ryuu went, he made damn sure he was comfortable. Whenever she so much as neared his house even her own scarcely exposed skin could detect the change, and suddenly she didn't mind. It was still.

And stillness was something that, prior to Ryuu's house, Raiku had never experienced.

She tried to summon some of that stillness to her aid now, where she was pressed against the wall, trapped against the wall, waiting out a storm she had more of an innate right to enjoy than anyone. Her fingers shook slightly under the pressure, loudly bemoaning her inability to summon chakra to her aid, and her blood wept in an uncharacteristically melodramatic way as the lightning struggled with the clouds above.

Raiku took a deep breath that failed to calm her but did manage to make her focus, opening her eyes. She had to move. If the lightning started and it would start, given that lightning as a possibility became an inevitability wherever she was concerned, the wall wouldn't help her. She'd seen lightning bend around corners and try to open windows in its attempts to get to her, so pressed to a wall in the open was a problem. But…

But it's raining, a voice in her head whined in a way dangerously close to petulant. And it's cold.

She shook her head, reminding herself that she was a Konoha kunoichi, and she could do this. And not only that, she frowned to herself, but she didn't feel the cold very well, because she had somewhat of a heater installed inside her skin. Wondering what on earth she was playing at and resolving to have a long, stern conversation with herself once this was all over, Raiku gingerly slid a cramped foot out of her small area and flattened the sole of it against the wall, trying laboriously to fix chakra to the bottom of her shoe. When her foot stuck in a precarious way that made Daisukenojo's wondrous chakra seem even more enviable, she promptly moved her hands up to the window sill and grasped tightly, sliding her foot off the small ledge that was now supporting her and letting her weight hang suspended between her arms and affixed foot.

Now that she was in an even more awkward position than before, Raiku slowly drew chakra to her shoe and pressed her foot flat to the wall. That accomplished, she turned her body slowly so that her nose was facing the wall and her Achilles tendons were showing off at the angle they were bent at.

This was it. Moment of truth. She gingerly lifted a finger of each hand off the windowsill, slowly preparing to let her own chakra take her weight. After she started to shift backwards, she reluctantly lifted two more fingers.

'This is ridiculous.'

And she knew that, thank you very much, she didn't need to demoralise herself any more than she already had.

'Shut up,' she grumbled to herself.

'This looks ridiculous.'

'I refuse to perpetuate the stereotype that dictates all Gairanos talk to themselves,' she said sternly, easing another finger loose. 'As well as that, I'm pretty poor conversation so you, me, can just shut up right now, before the lightning finds me.'

'…You have easily the poorest senses of any shinobi. Pathetic. I am, however, surprised that you appear to know words longer than monosyllabic.'

Raiku's eyebrows shot up and she almost collapsed against the wall in surprise and indignation. What the hell was that?! Rarely did she undermine her intelligence over her abilities as a kunoichi.

When there was no answer forthcoming, she found her cramped limbs tensing in something other than mere physical discomfort.

Something tapped the top of the remaining finger of her left hand briefly.

'I'm not looking,' she said stubbornly, glaring at the bricks like they were somehow responsible for her slip in character and the rain, growing ever heavier and beginning to drip down the walls, lining the air with moisture. 'I'm not looking, because I just know I'm not going to like what I see.'

The tap turned to a firm grasp on either side of her finger, and to her supreme horror, her finger was slowly and threateningly lifted a few millimetres from the windowsill.

She unwillingly raised her gaze to a few inches above eye level, high enough to take in the stunned and horrified spider clinging, much like she was, to the underside of the windowsill.

Her finger began to hurt as it was lifted higher, at what was now an incredibly awkward angle.

She dragged her eyes further up, briefly resting on a creamy shirt, a masculine neck and then a wonderfully defined jaw line, before they finally rested on a pair of utterly blank ones.

She stared. 'I suppose it's out of the question for you to let me go and pretend that this never happened.'

'Yes, it is,' Neji confirmed.

She nodded to herself. 'I suppose you want an explanation for why I'm under your windowsill.'

'Yes, I do,' Neji said evenly.

Raiku bit her lip. 'Can it wait until after the rain's stopped?'

'No it can't,' Neji said, twisting her finger slightly. She twitched at the pain, whimpering.

'I didn't think so.' She looked down at her feet and slid one up, pushing her to eye level with the somewhat bemused and significantly annoyed Hyuuga. 'So,' she began awkwardly with a completely characteristic lack of discretion. 'Can I… have my finger back?'

Without changing his expression at all or looking away from her face, Neji twisted her finger further around. She gasped at the sudden surge of pain, eyes watering slightly. 'Okay! Okay, explanations!' she winced, arm twisting awkwardly to try and alleviate the pain. 'It's raining! It's raining and this was the nearest wall! Sorry, I'm sorry!'

'Why did you need to find a wall?' Neji asked. As a Plot convenient reminder, the sound of the rain began to filter in to Raiku's panic hazed mind, the steady drumming of water hitting roofs and cement bringing up something rather significant. The smell of wet earth and that unique scent that followed rain everywhere served to make her calming breath useless, sending another surge of urgency to her brain.

'I… didn't want to mess up my hair?' she offered. She cringed at the words even as they left her mouth. Her hair was like some sort of aggravated porcupine at the best of times. Coming from Neji himself it may have been different, but from her it was only even more ridiculous than the position she was in.

Neji's lip curled slightly. She paled, recognising a sign of trouble. His grip tightened and she was forced to contort as he twisted again, spine and arm bent at an unnatural angle to minimise pain. 'Why are you here, Gairano? Don't lie this time.'

She craned her neck to eyeball the darkening, faintly rumbling clouds. 'I'm serious about the rain thing! I swear I am! I can't get wet!' she exclaimed, pressing herself closer to the windowsill- also Neji, but she was fixedly pretending he wasn't there- to try and escape the rain, by now more sleet than mere water.

'Why?' he asked flatly.

'Family rule!' She broke off into a yelp as she found her finger twisted and her body unable to contort to compensate any further, already impossibly placed. 'Family rule, I swear! I wish I could tell you, finger breaker, but I can't!'

And that was the point at which she literally, could not say more. He could snap that finger off her hand, and she simply wouldn't speak. It wasn't enough to threaten a Gairano when it came to the rules- their cowardice immediately replaced with penultimate pigheadedness in the face of Equalisers and worse-

Notice.

Notice worthy of mid-sentence capitalisation, even.

The thought was enough to make her shudder and the angle of her hand unnatural enough for him to interpret it as pain, watching her with narrowed eyes.

'Given the level of humidity,' she whimpered, shifting her head back to add a few centimetres to the scant distance between them, afraid of electrocuting as well as inadvertently insulting the shinobi prodigy, 'you might want to pull back a bit.'

His eyebrow moved slightly, narrowed eyes narrowed further.

'Please?' she attempted desperately.

Neji, as always, felt the need to be contrary in the face of challenge. He leaned forward slightly in a distinctly defiant way, enough for her to feel the heat coming off his skin and enough for him to be inwardly shocked at the warmth of the air around her. A low keening sound was pulled unwillingly from her throat at the realisation that struck her- he thought she was alarmed because he was close, but not for the reasons she actually was. This wasn't an issue she'd anticipated facing, ever, given her precarious physical situation.

She tried to think of some sort of an excuse, leaning back as far as she could without breaching the wall of water. Well, this was as bad as things reasonably could be. It would only be worse if Uzumaki found some sort of way of interfering.

As a matter of fact, what were the odds of Neji finding her? Out of all the windows in Konoha, what were the odds, especially given that she avoided all Hyuuga and clan members at all costs?

Her eyes gave no indication of the frown deepening under her mask as she considered this point. Was she in fact free of the Plot? Or was she steadily succumbing to its influence? Her eyes widened as something tugged on her ankle. That sneaky little bastard! That little- oh, it knew. It knew where she was the moment it had shown up. It had probably done something completely unnecessary to bring him here. The idea of intentionally luring a Hyuuga anywhere, especially this one, was repugnant to her Gairano senses of evasion. She grimaced.

'As hard as it is for a Gairano, try to stay focused,' Neji said with chilly irritation, unable to not notice that he was losing her fleeting attention.

She opened her mouth to defend her family's honour and promptly realised that as it had none doing so would be superfluous. She closed her mouth again and settled for nodding with strained good will. A muscle in her eye twitched. 'Any other questions, Hyuuga?' In light of the circumstances, a higher level of formality was called for. No doubt it looked like she was stalking him, which was something so incredibly suicidal just thinking of it made her want to weep with fear, so the re-establishing of levels of acquaintance was necessary.

For a moment Neji glared at her, perfectly still in Raiku's current moving world comprised of a windowsill and endless rain, still holding her beleaguered digit between his own, infinitely more elegant fingers. He monitored her impossible heart rate, took in the strangely irregular flow of her breath before he spoke again.

'You're afraid of me.' There was a shadow of a possibility of a theoretical upwards movement at the corner of his lips, one that she recognised from Ryuu. She couldn't place the phantom expression, but recognising it was something Ryuu did meant absolutely nothing good.

'I'm afraid of everything,' she said evasively. 'Especially rain!'

Thunder boomed.

'And lightning,' she added hastily, expression changing into one Neji couldn't easily place, at least with that damn mask on.

His eyes shifted back into glare mode, and Raiku cringed, wondering what she'd done wrong. 'Lightning!' she repeated in an attempt to remind him. 'Lightning is bad!'

'You're hardly at risk.' His words were measured and clipped in his annoyance, annoyance she couldn't easily trace.

'I think you'd be surprised!' she said in tones bordering on hysteria, eyes shining with fear in the dim grey light the cloud allowed to reach them. 'Please let me go!'

She hated begging. Hated it even more when all she wanted to do was rip through the sky in power that shrieked, absorbing what she didn't overpower and receiving endlessness that sang in her veins and soothed the familiar ache of repression and what wasn't quite isolation. She hated begging for the purpose of avoiding what she so rarely had the opportunity to experience, because she always did so.

And then she made her biggest mistake (today, or at least within the past second or two).

She sighed. In longing and resignation, but the mistake was in the act of sighing itself.

Neji's grip tightened. 'Am I boring you, Gairano?' he asked tersely.

'No! No, you're quite entert- interesting,' she corrected, flinching at the instantaneous spark of ire. 'You're very interesting.'

'Perhaps you'd prefer to be elsewhere?' he continued with all the good cheer of a venomous snake. With a powerful shove and the immediate failure of the chakra on her feet, Raiku's relative safety disintegrated. She slammed into the wall of water and through, instantly saturated and freezing cold. The water drenched her clothes and skin, something viciously appreciative howling out through every pore to make itself known before she could even register she was flying backwards, long before she shifted to land heavily on her feet in the water puddling on the street. The rain pounded into her slim shoulders and the exposed skin of her scalp and neck, water shimmering over her glowing skin and clothes in a way no refraction of light could excuse.

She paused to regain her bearings as the freezing water poured in rivulets down her face and by extension mask, hair plastered to her head and forehead. She looked up as through the euphoria, recollection struck. And it was because she was near the Hyuuga Compound, and it was because she couldn't think and because everything was harder now that she couldn't move as, framed by the window frame like some statue, Hyuuga Neji stared at her and as she stared back. Dread settled like lead in her stomach while she crouched in the street in the rain and while he stood in the warmth and dry of his home, confirming what he'd suspected.

'Lightning techniques,' he echoed with that curious, permanent bitterness. It was enough to make her remember who she was and who he was and enough to make her throw herself through the window so quickly the lightning missed her and split the street behind her with a thunderous crack, hands outstretched as he shifted to counter- too slow- and grasped him by his thankfully clad shoulders, sending mild jolts through his system as he slammed back onto the tatami mats that covered the floor, pinned with desperation he was beginning to associate with the thin girl.

'Please,' she pleaded with him urgently, hands fisting in his shirt even as he moved to throw her from him, voice cracking as she fought the urge to just give in to the inevitability of discovery. 'Please don't tell anyone!'

He looked up at her with pale, angry eyes and said nothing. This expression of aggravation was enough to taint her hysteria with the beginnings of hopelessness, a feeling she tried to suppress as best she could.

'Please,' she repeated, water dripping from her clothes onto him and bead of moisture falling from her hair to his with biting jerks of pain as it landed on his skin. Her hands shook slightly, she compensated by tightening her grip. 'Please don't,' she whispered, hanging her head and closing her eyes. It would have been a gesture of appropriate request had she not been almost-sitting on him and he hadn't been seriously considering just murdering her, secrets and answers aside.

'Get off me!' he growled, managing to twitch instead of jerk each time something electrified hit his skin. He couldn't risk touching her any more than her hands on his shirt, lest he find out first-hand the power of the "lightning techniques", and her proximity was only serving to worsen the situation. On Raiku's part, the contact and the almost-contact was making every muscle tense in preparation for flight and her grip on his shirt tenuous at best from nervousness. She wasn't used to being close to people. She wasn't even this close to someone when she fought them, generally preferring to force them as far away as possible for this very reason.

'I really want to,' she said, hands releasing his shirt slightly. 'But please just promise me that you won't!' she pleaded, moisture that Neji suspected wasn't from the sky wavering in her opened eyes. 'You don't know what'll happen to me if you tell anyone! I'm not supposed to be like this!'

'Like what- like the demon Uzumaki?' he demanded as the face above his flinched. 'What are you?'

'I'm human … I am!' she insisted. 'I'm human…' she muttered, trailing off. She was. No Plot would make her anything more or less. She was simply human and … extra parts. Or maybe even missing something that stopped humans from being what she was.

She closed her eyes in silent prayer. 'Please don't tell anyone what's wrong with me,' she said quietly, as thunder made the glass in the windows shake. 'No one's allowed to know.'

'Are you honestly threatening me, Gairano?' Neji asked in a low, deadly voice.

She sighed heavily, gloved hands at some point simply resting heavily on his shoulders. 'No. My family doesn't want me to be this way. I'm not meant to be like this and they'll be angry with me if they find out you've found out. I'm not … I'm not meant to be like this,' she said again, exhaling heavily. It was hard to get her point across- the significant silences, the meaningful looks and the knowledge, constant knowledge that you are what you are and that is okay as long as you keep it to yourself.

For someone as verbally inelegant as Raiku, this was understandably difficult. 'I don't want people to think of me like this.' Like a glowing freak who couldn't stop, like someone even further from them than her complete incapacity for human touch made her. 'I'm not supposed to be this,' she said, more forcefully, throwing the words far from her as though it would make the thought itself leave. She knew her father loved her when he was her father, but when he was the head of Gairano he couldn't like what she was. He loved that she was different, when he was her father, but no one else did. In fact, they were the only ones that didn't mind her being what she was.

But neither of them didn't mind it all the time. The constant, now broken creed of the Gairano family declared they couldn't stand out and they couldn't be noticed, but everything about her demanded attention that she herself didn't desire.

'If you tell anyone, I could die. And if,' she pressed on as Neji visibly tensed at the ultimatum, 'I don't, then I'll always be even more of a loner… freak than I am now. I can't go against my family, no one else would want me.'

By god it was true and it stung. Ryuu and Daisukenojo accepted what she was, but to her it seemed as though they accepted it on the grounds that she wasn't that all the time. And she was.

'They'd kill you.'

It was more to himself than her. She wondered if he'd take this opportunity to get rid of her for good.

'Will I forget we had this conversation, Gairano? Is that what your family does?' he asked icily. His superiority was impressive, given that a girl who weighed, at an absolute maximum, fifty kilos was currently incapacitating him.

'My family doesn't do that. My family just enjoys that.'

She hesitated to call it what she just knew would make things infinitely worse, failed to find another word and settled. 'It's fate. Destiny. Lack of destiny, maybe. You,' she conceded awkwardly as lightning flashed. 'Will probably forget me. Everybody … will probably forget me.'

'Even if they knew what sort of thing you were?'

The word "thing" made her flinch. If he cared, he didn't show it. 'Even then,' she confirmed wearily. 'It's what you get when you don't have a destiny. Doomed to be of little consequence. It's not bad, really.'

Slip 2. 3? It didn't matter.

'You accept meaning nothing.' And he was angry with her, enraged maybe. Something she'd said had set him off, yet again.

'Well… I don't mean anything,' she muttered. 'Except to my family. And if you tell, I won't even mean that much.'

'Stop that. Turn it off,' he snapped when he found himself yet again being distracted by being mildly shocked by her dripping clothing. The tatami mats were drenched beyond repair. She was turning out to be an expensive revelation.

'I can't.'

This caused the most minute of pauses.

'You can't,' he repeated flatly.

'I can't,' she nodded.

'… At all.'

'At all.'

He was definitely sick of it, and this new bit of information didn't help. She was shoved unceremoniously off him and onto the mats, drawing her legs up to herself protectively as he rose into a semi-graceful sitting position.

'Relax, idiot,' he muttered, when it became clear she was about to panic and/or start an electrical fire from nerves. 'There's no benefit to spreading this information.'

'That's not true,' she said blandly. Dishonesty would earn her no favours here. He seemed mildly approving of that acknowledgement.

'No,' he confirmed. 'But I'm not going to tell anyone. On,' he added as she brightened with hope that almost wounded him. 'Several conditions.'

'Yes?' she asked, tilting her head quizzically.

Neji exhaled lightly, shaking his head.

Despite being in a bad situation – the worst situation, let's not beat around the bush here- Raiku found herself feeling… Oddly optimistic.


	26. necessarily unnecessarily complex clothes

'I want answers,' Neji said matter-of-factly.

Raiku paused. 'What  _kind_  of answers, because I can't answer some sorts of que-,'

'Answers,' he said flatly.

'Right,' she nodded, cringing. 'Right.'

'You'll tell me what I want to know. If you lie to me, our agreement is void.'

Another pause. 'Define "lie-"'

'Anything less than the perfect truth,' Neji supplied with a distinct lack of agreeable compromise. She sagged in disappointment, thin shoulders slumping.

'And dry yourself off,' he ordered in afterthought. 'There's no point in you ruining the floor.'

'Can't,' she said glumly, by now fully bound to the 'no lying' clause.

Neji took a deep, calming breath. 'Why?'

She shrugged. 'Just can't.'

He gave a faint snort of derision, moving on. 'When did you acquire this ability, and where?'

'Prior to my birth and … I'm sure you get the message. It's more of a condition than an ability, by the way.'

'Is it why you can move as quickly as you do?' he continued, ignoring her definition.

'Yes.' She hesitated. '… _Probably_ ,' she added.

'Any other effects?' he asked.

She gave him an odd look. 'Yes. Electricity, all the time?' she answered slowly and vaguely patronisingly, as though talking to a particularly dim child. Neji didn't appreciate this.

'Aside from the obvious,' Neji gritted out.

She eyeballed him warily as she rattled off a list. 'Lightning really loves me, I can't swim or use chakra properly. Gaara hates me-' she broke off, lowering her voice to mutter under her breath. 'At least I  _think_  that's a side-effect… And you hate me too, but I think that's because I called you a girl,' she said in addition.

Neji's eyes sparked with hostility.

'You're… You'd be a lovely girl,' she said awkwardly, rubbing the back of her head. 'You're… you're very…' beautiful '…pretty.'

'Continuing,' he said with a strained tone, a muscle working in his jaw. She recognised the signs of someone contemplating horrible murder. Ryuu gave off all of those signs, all of the time. 'You said you can't turn it off.'

She looked at him expectantly. He wore a similar, but infinitely more restrained and hostile look. He at last grasped the odd way Raiku's mind functioned and elaborated. 'Is it true and what happens as a result?'

'It's true. Well, I can turn almost all of it off, but it's always… on. Sort of.' She waggled gloved fingers at his unimpressed face, stretching a thin arm across the dim room to a few inches from his head. Sparks flickered on the skin in the holes above her palm, corresponding eerily to the far more potent ones trying to get inside. 'I don't… have a problem with my face or anything… the masks and gloves and all the rest are to stop me from hurting people,' she explained. She creased her eyes to indicate a smile, and hated how she felt his eyes go through her. 'It's not as bad as people think… it just gets kind of hot sometimes.'

He watched her for a while, before snorting lightly. She recoiled as though he'd cursed. 'Is this why Hinata goes red at the mention of your name? The electricity?'

She stared at him uncomprehendingly.

'We did hear about the incident on the street,' he said, smirking at her sudden discomfort. 'Did you touch her?'

'Almost,' she admitted abashedly. She wrung her hands, trying to think of an appropriate explanation. 'It's … weird. But I didn't quite touch her.'

'Explain.'

'You're very impatient,' she observed with a frown. 'And it's hard to explain. For me. I'm not…' floundering, again, always struggling… 'I'm not good with words.' She reached up and tugged a glove off, flexing pale, long fingers and stretched them out towards him. Unwillingly, he leaned back.

'What are you doing?' he asked suspiciously.

'Just… gimme your hand,' she instructed exasperatedly. 'It's not gonna hurt. It just feels weird, apparently.'

He stretched out a hand cautiously, leaving it open with the palm facing upwards in the air between them. She flexed her fingers again to hide her nerves, hoping she hadn't inadvertently lied. 'Okay,' she said, hand hesitantly coming to hover a few inches above his steady one. 'Just… watch.' She let her hand drop the smallest of degrees down, a thin tendril of blue power dancing from her skin to his. His hand jerked reflexively, the stiffening of his jaw indicating his own annoyance at one of them. He put it out again stubbornly. She gave a pained smile, fingertips hovering above his. He didn't jerk but he did twitch slightly, which she was wise enough to pass off as bioelectrical stimulation as the thin strands of power tied her fingers to his.

'So … I didn't quite touch her,' she said sheepishly, looking up at his face again. Her fingers jerked back and into a loose fist to sever the connection as she took in his expression, slightly flushed and his jaw tense. 'Are… you alright?' she asked slowly.

Neji nodded stiffly.

She looked uncertain. 'Can I… go?'

He gave another nod.

She surged to her feet with embarrassing relief and vanished out the window with a flash of white blue light, leaving the room dark with only the repetitive drumming of the rain to break the silence. He slowly curled his hand into a fist, letting it fall to his side as thunder shook the walls.

Needless to say, Ryuu adamantly refused to help her this time, given that she was dripping wet, sparking and somewhere along the way, she'd lost her glove and left shoe. But Raiku was never, truly, alone, not until she was what she was and apologised for it, so Ryuu just talked to her through the glass until the rain stopped and her skin stopped glowing, easily ignoring his exaggerated disappointment at the sudden semi-normality of her appearance. And when she couldn't put it off anymore, she went home and he let her, knowing full well that fated hated her enough to make her come back.

 

 

 

 

 

There wasn't enough instant miso in the world to make her tell her father about Neji. Regardless of whether Neji did in fact break his promise or not, she should have done so anyway. Should do so- there was still time, after all.

But standing in the doorway as the light drizzle changed and began to hammer onto the tiles of the roof and lightning cracked the nearest window, she just couldn't. It was bad enough she'd been tricked by a Plot, this would just make everything that much worse. She'd been found out, because ever since she'd become a goddamn ninja everything had gotten harder, and ever since she'd become a goddamn ninja she'd started losing track of the lies she told her friends, the lies she told her family and the ones she told herself out of habit.

Raiku wanted to run away, not for the first time.

But as aforementioned goddamn ninja, she slipped her remaining shoe off, loosened the kunai pouch bandaged to her leg and padded down the hallway, pulling down her mask and sliding her gloves into her pockets. The steel door she passed was black with plot, shimmering with odd colours like light playing on oil, giving her snatches of voices, laughter and screams as her father tried to fix and find what she'd changed, tried to read the Plot she didn't particularly want to be a part of.

She wondered if Sakura would mind Naruto so much if she knew what beauty they'd be capable of. She absently pulled her bare hands up and ran her fingers over her face, closing her eyes as she stepped up the stairs on light feet in memorised route, trying to picture what she couldn't see. Would it be so horrible, touching someone else? For that matter, was it that great?

Her skin was smooth under her fingertips and crackled faintly from even this small amount of friction, light gathering on pale eyelashes and along her hairline. Skin wasn't so important, surely. Surely it wasn't something so vital to a human relationship.

Surely not.

She slid the shoji door across and closed it behind her, tugging off her forehead protector in the relative safety of her room. She had a futon next to the wall more window than barrier that overlooked in half a ridge of the mountain and otherwise the forest, various electrical devices scattered along the floor that she'd broken or been asked to fix. The moonlight cast the room in earthen shades of blue and brown, the darkness of the shadows almost indistinguishable from the more comforting tones. She nudged aside an old radio that hadn't survived her ungloved attempt to change the station and sank onto the edge of her futon, exhaling heavily and drawing a leg up to remove the wrappings from her shins, tugging at the similar ones around her left palm and forearms with her teeth.

Rule four of shinobi: unnecessarily complicated clothes- necessary. She obeyed the rules of being a shinobi as long as they didn't conflict with those of being a Gairano, as best she could. She yanked a senbon out of her sleeve and balanced it on her finger thoughtfully.

She was a shinobi.

She had a tendency to forget in light of her own cowardice and incompetence, but the fact was that she had achieved the first stage of her ultimate goal. The last being a nondescript death, but that wasn't so much a goal as an expectation. She knew how to throw this to hurt, where to puncture with it to kill and how to (poorly) pick a lock with it.

She smiled to herself, running a hand through dripping hair, slicking it back from her face. She'd accomplished something. Gairano Raiku had done something, and she'd only run away for most of it. She drummed her fingers on her knee, considering this point.

It didn't often occur to Raiku that she was only thirteen, nor did she often consider the gaps between her life and that of the average thirteen year old. In fact… it didn't often occur to her that there were any. But earlier, when she'd literally had her hands on one of, arguably, the most attractive boys in her age bracket, she mused that she should have felt  _something_.

That would have been normal… yes?

But of course, it was just a body, and everyone had one. It wasn't relevant to her, and never would be, because the only one that would ever be of her concern was hers.

She tilted her head, face set in that mask of casual apathy it always assumed when there was no one there who needed to read it. She should have been more … something.

She shrugged, setting to free the other shin from the wrappings. It couldn't be that important.


	27. familial love and responsibility

On the morning of the Third Exam, Ryuu met Yamada at dawn and showed him how to make a storm. Daisukenojo fought his way free of a concerned medic of a mother and multiple devilish siblings to get good seats for him and his teammate. Mura left the compound before the light of dawn had struck the hidden village and Raiku followed and lost her.

It took dawn and four hours for her to find Mura again. Eyes bloodshot with the strain of keeping her mind within the parameters of her own skull, she rubbed her face wearily. She couldn't find her. She'd dropped down to street level, even, to try and ask around but…

No Mura.

But she knew where she was. She visibly seethed as from the stadium, explosions and cheers echoed faintly, knowing that was where she should be. Hell, it was where  _Shiranui_  should be, given he was an Elite Jounin. She shuddered at the thought that they could be 'otherwise occupied', recalling several flattering but ultimately disturbing rumours.

If Mura had endangered her life for  _this_ … She flexed fingers that stuck to each other uncomfortably, dried blood from her earlier mishap staining them patchy brown. She'd see whether full contact would kill or just cause arrhythmia. The attempt to find Mura through the only equivalent of chakra tracking she'd ever be able to use had been disastrous, the physical pull of electricity ripping her from her post on top of the building she had last seen Mura from and dragging her along iron shingles, ungloved hands clinging desperately to the conductor as she tried to calm herself. She hadn't had time to put on gloves and could only be thankful that she'd wrapped her hands the night before, a result of the nigh-perpetual insomnia she'd developed.

Mura was her responsibility, which Mura knew perfectly well. Mura's escape would jeopardise both their lives, and Raiku didn't bother to restrain the vicious backlash of heat surging up through her throat at the thought. Mura would kill them both. The Equalisers would come from behind because they always killed from behind and Raiku's existence would be completely erased. She couldn't let Mura be seen with Shiranui. Mura had used up her one chance, which was one more than they usually got. Raiku was  _responsible_. She didn't want to think of the inherent flaws in having a thirteen year old responsible for a twenty-something year old, but Mura would have known them anyway.

How could she do this to Raiku? Raiku had done everything right, she'd done everything she was supposed to, and she was still-

'Gairano… Raiku.'

On second thought, she may find out a lot sooner. 'That's me,' she said slowly, frame remaining carefully relaxed, hands hanging with deceptive calm in front of her. Don't move. They may be there to give a message, there's no reason to do anything, she told herself to try and calm her petrified mind.

An odd and measured breath, as though they were breathing through the mouth instead of the nose. 'Where … is Gairano… Mura?'

The restrictive masks gave a deliberately recognisable, disjointed manner of speech. Raiku flinched. 'She's elsewhere,' she said evenly, eyes fixed ahead with focus many would find unusual for her, her speech stilted and formal. 'I am, of course, no longer responsible for her after the completion of my last mission.'

It didn't work like that, how could it work like that? She could run, but that wouldn't achieve anything. She could fight, but it was well known (in some circles) what Equalisers were like. One soldier, one mission. She could survive…

If she killed them first.

Raiku frowned to herself, thoughts flicking ahead in the scant time the Equaliser was taking to respond. Only the Equaliser on the mission was aware of the mission. That and her father, but he couldn't and wouldn't act once she'd proven she'd be willing to kill to live.

Wait, what was she thinking? This was ridiculous- she couldn't fight an Equaliser. They'd destroy her. She sighed wearily as the rasp of the Equaliser's breath drew closer. 'You are … still assigned… to Gairano Mura.'

She blinked in feigned surprise. 'I'm sorry, I wasn't quite-'

She ran, breaking off mid sentence to flicker through the distance like a series of motion captures, pushing off from the flat roof of a department store so hard the concrete cracked and blackened as she fled, already accelerated heart kicking into overdrive and form exploding into painfully conspicuous illumination.

 _IwanttoliveIwanttoliveIwantto-_  she shrieked in a combination of fear and pain as the tile she landed on turned black and cracked under her foot, sinking to send shards of hard-fired clay into her ankle and cutting through both wrappings and shoe. Ripping herself free with a stab of pain she lunged for the fire escape to try and get down into the virtually empty streets.

People. She needed people! For the first time in her entire life, Raiku sought the crowds. She changed direction mid-step and threw herself off the building in the direction of the stadium, plummeting downwards and landing lightly on her good foot, the other leaving a solid print of blood as she set off at a dead run. The Equaliser sped after her silently on the rooftops, flickering in what could, to the untrained eye, have been a match for her speed. But only techniques could grant speed unnatural, and their chakra would have to run out eventually.

She couldn't think, she didn't have time to  _think_ \- she had to attack. She couldn't just run, even though it was looking really goddamn tempting, because when they'd recovered they'd come after her. Her head snapped up to check on the progress of her pursuer and she  _had_  to admire the speed of their technique because teleportation was  _hard_ -

The stadium was in sight and she could have sobbed with relief. They wouldn't hurt her in front of a crowd and it would give her time to plan and maybe even escape… The fire in her ankle was eclipsed by a more immediate problem. The concrete cracked and surged up to meet her, almost in slow motion from her speed. But it was enough to make her jump and land in something that gave more than concrete should have, her continued momentum almost slamming her into the ground as her feet stuck. She forced herself upright and tried to drag a foot free from sidewalk turned quicksand, only succeeding in driving the other downwards as it was forced to take her weight.

She cursed explosively, rubbing her hands together as a dark shadow flickered overhead. 'I will  _kill you Mura_!' she snarled with viciousness that she was beginning to realise may be native to her, power exploding to life over her clothes and skin before a dark form slammed into her side. The Equaliser gave a brief cry and tore free, their hold on the technique vanishing. Raiku's palms hit the solidifying ground and let her tear herself out of the ground, shoes gone and wrappings hanging in shreds from bleeding legs. She grimaced, dashing over the cement and up the side of a brick building, leaving a trail of black after her glowing, bleeding feet and struggling to keep her breathing even despite the cracking of her ribs. She grasped the edge of the roof and swung herself up and over, catching sight of the Equaliser in her peripheral, flickering into places she had just vacated as she ran and tried to ignore the idea that the technique had been developed for this very purpose.

It wasn't far.

It wasn't far and if she wanted to live as badly as she thought she did she would make it.  _No one was as fast as she was._ In answer to the challenge the Equaliser presented power ripped through her limbs and nerves, taking her from that blur to untraceable velocity and setting the world in relative slow motion enough for her to see it really was teleportation they were using, and that they were trying something else, leaving her with enough time to realise that her lungs were burning- how did she never notice?- and that if she didn't take time to breathe soon she would never have the chance again.

 _If it was Ryuu he would have caught me by now_ , she thought with no small amount of petty vindictiveness as the stadium loomed and she came to a crashing halt in the darkness of the entrance, surrounded by the comfortable roar of the masses before and above and concealed. She took a deep, shuddering breath, hands shaking from the adrenaline and mind quaking with relief that she hadn't yet been seen.

Her relief was, as always, short lived. The sunlight and more importantly, the entrance, vanished into a sea of darkness exploding upwards from the ground and left her in a dark box, even her panicked answering light swallowed by the shadow.

Contrary to popular belief, a life or death struggle in close quarters is not elegant. It is profoundly ugly. How could putting two or more people told to kill or die in a small space be anything less?

And she was in the dark.

Hands gripped her throat as she scrabbled blindly for purchase in the masked face above her and forced sharp fingers into the depressions where the eyes should have been, broken ribs violently protesting as the Equaliser screamed and her back crashed into the hidden floor, pinned there by the far superior weight of her would-be murderer. She gasped for air and smacked her free hand into the side of their head, fist glowing vibrantly and packing enough of a supernatural force to finally let the other nails puncture the featureless mask and rip a scream from the hidden throat. She surged upwards and rolled them, a hand digging wide fingertips into either side of her thin neck and the others wrapped around her ribcage. She let out a strangled gasp of pain as another rib gave with a sharp snap and sent a vicious jolt through desperately seeking fingers and the bared skin of shins pressed to her struggling enemy. Their back arched upwards and she made out a depression of a mouth opened in silent scream as the fingers convulsed on her covered skin.

She fisted her hand and brought it back to let it fly into the opponent's face and sinking into something that snapped and flooded the latex with the sickening warmth and smell of fresh blood. Her hand was grasped and yanked downwards until it smacked into pavement, leaving her to howl in pain and jerk her elbow into their throat as she was dragged downwards, pulling another strangled gasp of pain. And there, the kunai as the Equaliser's free hand sent it up between her ribs or where her ribs should have been, had she not thrown herself to the side. Her wrist gave in a way no wrist should when the Equaliser refused to let go of the hand they had captured and tried to drag her back, throwing their kunai wielding arm towards her and narrowly missing her elbow with the blade. Raiku's hand twisted and pulled free, leaving her with the knowledge of her mistake-

Never lose track of your enemy.

She scrambled to her feet and stood panting, fishing a kunai out of her previously neglected weapons pouch and holding it loosely in a battered hand, the other tucked protectively against her side as her eyes scanned the darkness blindly in an attempt to find the Equaliser.

She was irked to find she'd expected more finesse.

She was fast, yes- you'd have to be blind, deaf and stupid not to know that Raiku was simply the fastest. But she was weak and couldn't use techniques and she'd been under the impression she'd been put at a rather significant disadvantage-  _there_. There was the flash of her own light reflected off a kunai as the Equaliser attacked from her left, swift and sure strikes with the small blade easily parried and countered by her own slim weapon, at last playing a game that speed could win her. She feinted to the left and brought it back up to where the Equaliser's neck should have been and found instead the soft flesh of the arm, giving the kunai a savage yank down the length of the limb and spinning in closer to the body to stab and pull upwards.

What should have been a killing, disembowelling blow left only a shallow slice in the flesh of their abdomen, thwarted by the swift movement of her opponent. But her fingers ceased to hold the handle of the kunai, letting it clatter harmlessly to the floor as she twisted and placed a bare hand solidly on the chest of the Equaliser, touching someone's skin through the ripped fabric of their shirt, touching someone's skin for the first time in her life.

If this touch was what she was missing and what made all relationships real in ways hers weren't, she never wanted to be anything more than alone.

They lit up like some grotesque beacon and  _shrieked_  like nothing she'd ever heard, voice hoarse and raised to levels no one should have been able to achieve, voice full of agony and horror as under her hand, the flesh blackened and peeled, blood spilling from exposed veins and muscles cramping spasmodically as nerves received all the wrong messages and inside, the organs burning and splitting under force the body simply wasn't built to handle.

Her hand remained weighted on their chest even as the Equaliser fell backwards and their grip, locked in the desperate hold of the dying, dragged her down with them. Their back arched off the floor, bones broke under the power of the muscles attached and the  _screaming_  just never stopped. Until suddenly it did and sparks crackled along into a body that simply jerked horribly with residual power, motivated by no conscious will of movement. The darkness sank back into the natural shadows of the entrance and left her with a blackened corpse, broken ribs, bruised neck, a ruined wrist and legs with broken pieces of clay still lodged into weeping, glowing flesh.

Raiku panted with hand still braced against her defeated enemy to keep her from collapsing, limbs shaking with lingering terror, adrenaline and in many cases, pain. She dragged herself into a standing position and cradled her injured wrist against her chest, blood from an injury she hadn't noticed dripping from somewhere above her hairline into her eyes. She blinked hard to clear her vision and took hold of one of the Equaliser's legs, dragging him from the stadium.

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku threw herself from the waiting shadows onto the back of Gairano Mura as she left the building she'd been occupied in for the past six hours, landing heavily on her back and pulling an arm up to lock both Mura's head and shoulder in a hold before they landed, injured shins readily accepting the impact into the concrete as Mura fell, effectively pinned.

'Are you happy now!?' Raiku hissed into her ear, voice hoarse from screams and strangulation as Mura gasped for breath, face pressed into the sidewalk. She tightened her grip, drawing a sharp inhalation from the pain.

'What are you talking about?' Mura gasped, breaking off into a groan as Raiku twisted her arm savagely, staining Mura's shirt forever with blood.

'You couldn't keep yourself under control?!' Raiku demanded, her injured hand burying itself in Mura's hair, grasping and pulling up sharply to expose her neck. The rage buried in her chest shrieked in vindication: at last, success! 'Is this worth it, knowing that you're only going to live because they came after me first?! I wanted to  _help_  you, I was just doing what I was told and you were going to let me  _die_!'

Her grip tightened through no will of her own as she demanded an answer, hysteria rising in her throat to choke her. 'Is this worth it!?' she repeated, raising her voice slightly.

Mura swallowed awkwardly, neck bent painfully. 'Yes,' she rasped, closing her eyes to steel herself against what she believed Raiku had in store. 'It is.'

Raiku drew a shuddering breath and let Mura's head fall into the sidewalk with a dull thud, pulling her arm free and rising to a standing position. She drew a trembling hand up to her face and hid her eyes in her bleeding palm, shoulders shaking violently. The weight of the day hitting her young shoulders. Mura turned and rose with obvious caution, warily extending a hand to pat Raiku on the shoulder.

Raiku's voice lashed out like a whip. 'Don't!'

Mura's hand jerked back, falling back to her side as she watched the thirteen year old. 'You might understand one day,' she said, instead of the words of consolation and assurance that were vying for the opportunity to escape her.

'I hate you,' Raiku forced out, trying to breathe deeply and force herself to return to a state of calm. She found she meant it, found that the anger was trying to rip its way free past her fear and her trauma and was hindered only by the stabbing pain of broken ribs and ripped skin. 'I'll never understand,  _never_.'

How could she, a creature like Raiku?

And then the explosions started and Konoha screamed, and the problems of a family and the manifestations of its love became inconsequential.


	28. personal storms and broken bones

Screams broke out through the streets even as unearthly silence fell over the far stadium, making Mura take a wary step back. 'What's going on?'

'Shut up!' Raiku snapped, trying to listen. She wasn't in the mood for any of this bullshit any more. She didn't want to deal with terrified civilians. She didn't want to calm down or be  _understanding_ and she wanted to kill things.

Murder was familiar ground, after all.

The ground shook as, with a colossal sound unlike anything she'd heard, the East gate crumbled under the onslaught of three snakes larger than the entire circumference of the walls themselves, lunging forward to throw massive bulks against buildings not built for the impact, crumbling instantly.

Raiku's eyes widened. Despite herself, she gave a low whistle. 'That's a really big summon.'

Something giddily darted through her veins, heat searching for an outlet as she reached up to absently tug a sleeve off her good arm, the flash of a shuriken taking care of burnt and tattered wrappings, material both dark and pale dropping to the ground. She took more care with the injured arm, taking hold of her wrist and faintly purple hand and taking a deep breath.

Mura paled. 'Oh, don't-'

Raiku gave a sharp jerk and strangled scream, colour fleeing her face as the world spun. She numbly flexed her injured fingers to test the restored movement, fully aware that this was no substitute for a splint or a medic, but knowing it would have to do. She swayed slightly before she caught herself, gritting her teeth and ripping sleeve and wrappings from her arms, rolling her shoulders and slamming a palm into the air in the direction of the Sand-nin that jumped from the building above her to some destination unknown, catching them in flight with power of her colour. She bared her teeth in sudden, perfect understanding of why Ryuu smiled the way he did and leaped, twisting and slamming an elbow into the burnt midriff as the Sand-nin plummeted, leaving a crater and rising dust where they landed.

Mura stepped back and found cold steel pressed into her palm and her cheek patted with the blade of her new kunai, Raiku's hand temporarily wrapped in latex out of consideration.

'Try not to die before I can kill you,' Raiku said with malicious cheer, vanishing in a flicker. As Raiku darted over rooftops in a highly conspicuous and highly electrified blur of white blue light, she wondered with a sort of macabre fascination, just how well the skin of a snake conducted electricity.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a union that fate smiled on. Several Sand-nin, attracted by the colour-  _they're as bad as moths_ , she thought to herself- and the motion, broke away from their group and pelted in her direction, increasing speed until they became blurs. Her face split into a savage grin, possessed by pain, adrenaline and aggression.

_Do you want to race…?_

A bit too late to calm down, a bit too late to convince her what she was doing was a bad idea, she braced a foot on a chimney and hurtled towards them, trailing electric death in her wake.

A black blur was thrown off by her speed and suddenly her mind cleared.

Then reality came forward, backhanded her across the face and started talking about what a  _bad_  idea this was and why she hadn't done it  _before_ -

And Raiku learned how to fly.

Of course, at such speeds, a single twitch can rapidly change direction, which- of course- it did when she shrieked in surprise and flung an arm up to protect her suddenly airborne face, sending her to the left in an uncontrolled, panicked spin. Flailing could really, only make this that much worse.

But when had that ever stopped her before? She caught the edge of a building with a flailing limb, sending her careening through the air with a sickening crack, at last managing to latch onto a nearby wall, panting.

Alright. She could admit that was a bad move. It had felt really, really good, but  _that was entirely beside the point_. The Sand-nins had caught sight of where she'd been headed and changed direction, bearing in on her with all the inherent mercy of a flock of vultures. She thought mournfully of how this was the point at which she should reveal some awesome shinobi technique, but was left with only what she already was.

Sure, it didn't take chakra and it didn't run out, but- she thrust out her hands, settling bare, bleeding feet on the edges of the building's fuse box, giving one short stamp to dislodge the lid as power almost threw her backwards, dodged narrowly by her new opponents.

She'd killed an Equaliser, so this couldn't be that much harder… right? She dropped into a crouch and fisted her injured hand in the mess of cabling, foreign and somewhat traumatised power surging through her fist, along her arms until it escaped, shrieking outwards through her other outstretched palm, turning herself into the perfect conductor and better allowing her to move. But it wasn't as potent as she was and she found herself feeling somewhat disgruntled as along the circuit, breakers struggled to destroy the path of power, the corresponding manifestation of her annoyance thickening the bolt of energy and slamming squarely into the chest of the closest Sand-nin with a hoarse scream.

She grinned as a blackened corpse dropped from the air, immediately overtaken by the far more inconvenient living teammates and making her glee falter slightly.

Oh, yes- they were coming to kill her. She tore her hand free of the wires, freeing herself from the power grid and jumping up, kicking off a wall to raise her to the level of the roofs and setting off again, careful to maintain only the speed she was accustomed to.

When someone who could be compared, in flight, to a blind pigeon with no sense of direction had become airborne for the first time, it was best not to immediately repeat the experience. And from the seizing, burning agony that her right knee had gained from the experience, that was the wiser move anyway.

It always looked so easy in the movies.

She sped past the two Sand Genin carrying their more belligerent counterpart between them, missing them by a hairsbreadth and almost sending herself into yet another wall as the Uchiha followed them a small way behind, not bothering to try and get out of the way as they had. She growled at him as she passed, limp growing more pronounced and simply jumping from one leg to avoid losing speed in her run to the stadium. Was she running towards her death?  _Probably_. It was the proud tradition of the Gairano family after all. A magnetised kunai was sent winging into the distance as it hit her electrical field, making her fiercely glad that they hadn't seen fit to bring the kind that couldn't be affected by it. Then again, this was hardly a normal thing to encounter, so they couldn't be blamed. She, on the other hand… well, that was a different matter. She reached down and pulled out a kunai for each hand, striking the blades against each other as they began to glow-red hot and threatened to burn her palms, spinning to throw them mid-step and turning back around without checking to see if they'd landed.

Raiku needed wire, she needed traps and things hard to see. She reached down to fish out the spool she loyally carried with her, ripping the seal from it and letting the tightly wound metal come slightly apart in her fingers, crackling as it, like her, began to glow. The stadium loomed in the distance and a large, dark rectangular prism of chakra, which she quickly told herself was none of her business and ignored.

Wait, was that the Ho-  _none. Of her. Business_.

No, seriously, that was totally the Hoka-  _stop that_.

She yelped and used her wire to hook around one of the spokes protruding to the roof and changing her trajectory as through concrete a man was sent screaming, setting her feet on the wall just above the massive hole and allowing herself to drop down, swinging through and rolling to absorb the impact.

She looked up, fingers splayed and crackling, well at the ready. This, she knew, made her look like she was wielding electric jazz hands, but she had  _very few options._

Sakura stared at her, jaw dropped.

She winced. She needed something to say to drop the tension, to make the ( _three Genin and two Jounin, how did she miss these things?_ ) shinobi staring at her focus.

'…'Sup?' she offered, cursing under her breath her own lack of eloquence.

'Sup? What was  _that_?

'Toaster,' Ryuu said, moving towards her and ripping a piece of his sleeve off with hands and teeth, never breaking stride. 'With me.'

She brightened in a way more than figurative and stood, rubbing her hands together and relishing the sound of quiet thunder. 'Alrighty!' Ryuu was there, he was good at excuses! Ryuu always had a plan. She could even see the well-oiled mechanisms of his brain whirring behind his downright malevolent stare.

'Raiku!?' Sakura goggled, taking in her appearance. 'How did you g- what happened to you, what happened to your  _legs_?'

'There were Sand-nin, there were family arguments, it's a very long story and I hope sincerely to-' she broke off into a strangled gurgle as Ryuu grasped her hand with the torn fabric, wrapping it around the injured appendage and clasping it tightly when he was certain he wouldn't be injured by electrical backlash.

'Not that wrist,' she whimpered, biting her lip as tears sprung to her eyes. He… ignored her.

He half-turned. 'Hatake, we can keep them from being followed,' he said, giving a firm nod.

'What? What's going on?' Naruto asked blearily, finding his arm yanked over Sakura's shoulders.

'I can explain on the way,' she said, jumping out of the hole Raiku had just entered.

Kakashi shook his head slightly. 'They're taken care of. Withdraw to the hospital, we'll need it soon enough.'

Ryuu's pale eyes slid over to her, glinting evilly. She paled. 'Oh no. Oh no, not that. Don't do that,' she pleaded. 'I've broken like, more than four bones, don't-'

'Take a deep breath,' Ryuu instructed with malevolent glee. She shook her head frantically.

'No! Ryuu,  _no -_ '

He inhaled sharply.

She didn't really have a choice. Ryuu vanished in a blur of wind and his hand dragged her with him into the fresh maelstrom and out of the stadium, sending the world into a breathless blur as they spun. Her power flared reflexively to protect her and set the storm alight with blue, racing in the wind after the nearest approaching Sand-nin. The wind howled in her ears and pressure slammed into her damaged body, compressing her chest and flinging her limbs out at awkward angles, anchored only by Ryuu's agonising grip on her hand. She opened her mouth to scream and found the air physically dragged from her lungs, skin turning ashen as she began to suffocate.

Part of the plan, naturally, and the part of the plan she objected to most strongly. In times of pain, stress and danger, like all defensive mechanisms, she started to lose the voice inside her head that kept a firm control over the other parts of her head that glowed blue.

It flared. She would have appreciated even a  _little_  time to recover- there went another rib, the horrific snap and instant pain gave it away- from the events of the past…

As black dots danced in front of her eyes, she managed to try and consider.

The events of the past… thirty minutes, even thirty  _seconds_  would have been nice, really, but of course not. That would have been ridiculous.

Her fierce and terrified grip on Ryuu's hand began to slacken as her skin paled under the current, tiny lacerations from various weapons dragged from the pouches of wind-crushed and electrically-burnt Sand and Sound-nin adding insult to injury. They came to an abrupt halt over a roof and she landed heavily on Ryuu, supported by hands suddenly firmly braced on either side of her ribs as she found herself draped over him, gasping for air. His neck was contorted to deprive her skin of the opportunity to kill him, his usually stoic face flushed and breath coming in pants.

'You alright to go again?' he asked, swallowing heavily and trying to focus, lifting her off him enough to make the distance safe.

'No,' she croaked, head lolling about as he unintentionally further compressed already nigh-shattered ribs. 'Never.'

He nodded in satisfaction- she realised her mistake in talking, eyeing the distance between the stadium and their current location with a distinct feeling of nausea.

'We need to help protect the hospital,' he muttered, head turning and tracing the direction of the enemy shinobi. 'You'll need it later.'

He looked back at her, giving her a light shake to bring her back to herself. 'Take a deep breath,' he ordered again, sounding fairly breathless himself. She made a low keening noise, dragging breath unwillingly into abused lungs as they set off again.

At least there was no one following her anymore. After this little stint, she'd probably welcome a murderous ninja or two. Or a hundred, really, it was much better than this- the miniature, personal storm built and they were ripped through the air on the wind of the localised tornado, the sudden drop in temperature mercifully starting to numb her extremities and better conducting what she gave it, thunder cracking in their wake as he took her with him, firmly answering any question of how he'd caught her previously after he'd started to create, blessedly, a path of less resistance. The artificial path allowed her to compensate for what should have been a drop in acceleration and use her own ability to carry her forward, wind and lightning sweeping up the human debris that had seen fit to invade, traveling away from the snake summons towards the besieged hospital (maybe there was a god after all).

When they came to a halt this time it was because even the adoring wind couldn't keep the abandoned weapons from being tossed into their proximity and Ryuu had blood in his eyes that dripped from his hairline, hissing in pain and releasing her hand to try and both stem the flow and clear his vision. 'What do you see!?' he demanded blindly.

Raiku swayed alarmingly, blinking to try and focus her eyes. Her vision wavered. 'I don't… I don't know,' she wheezed, staggering and placing a hand on the roof to try and steady herself. 'I … I don'…' she broke off, words slurring together in incoherency caused from both suffocation and blood loss. Her skin shone, the freedom of her personal physical conductors only enhanced by the iron in her blood, incisions only the size of paper-cuts making up in number for what they lacked in depth. She reached down with shaking fingers and tore a shuriken from the back of her shin, dropping it quickly. 'Nice,' she managed, glow flickering in indecisiveness. Was it meant to surge or stop?

It was only a condition, it wasn't known for its intelligence and it was trying its best.

Ryuu put a hand on the small part shoulder that still was safe to touch, eyelashes and eyes marked out in vibrant red. 'Stay with me,' he panted. 'We can do it.'

'I don't wan' to 'nymore,' she whimpered, shaking her head weakly. 'I don't want to…'

'Suck it up.' He dragged her up into a standing position, closing his eyes briefly. 'You ready?'

She didn't bother to respond, given he'd just take that as confirmation. She just took a deep breath in, registering that the deep breath of right now was a great deal shallower than the deep breath of only a few minutes previous.

He sighed wearily, bringing a hand up to clasp hers again, bruises in the shape of his fingertips pressed into the covered flesh. 'Good girl, toaster.'

The trip was the shortest through necessity, her own feeble desperation adding to what should have been terminal velocity to send them crashing to the ground at the front of the hospital in a blaze of electricity and wind that cut as easily as razors, barely cushioned by air rising to meet them and leaving Raiku with most of the skin of her arm left on the trail she'd been flung along on the cement. She made out the silhouette of Ryuu, no longer safe to touch her because of the conductivity of the blood from shallow cuts and hovering over her, nudging the side of a masked face. 'Toaster,' he panted, managing a small, cooler breeze that washed over her face. 'Toaster, c'mon. We're not done.'

A brilliant eye managed to fix itself on him, looking somewhat dazed. ' _You_  do it,' she half-slurred, half-groaned. Her knee had given up on burning and now simply throbbed, much like the rest of her. Except for this stabbing pain near one of her more-broken-than-the-other-broken-ribs rib, which she was a little concerned about. ' 'm  _done_.'

Crouching amongst human debris, blackened beyond recognition or sliced into pieces, Ryuu had to admit that she'd done pretty well, or they had both done a good job. But now wasn't the time for rest, and he told her as much. He ripped a piece of burnt fabric from a body he couldn't even tell the gender of anymore and wrapped it around his hands, sliding them under her body to pull her up. 'C'mon,' he grumbled, hoisting her up further and slapping the side of her face slightly. 'C'mon, wake up. You've got to kill some more people.'

'I…  _hate_  you,' she managed, glaring at him blearily. The metal of her forehead protector was slightly melted, unfortunate enough to stay connected by what was left of the fabric and forced to deal with what no inanimate object should. A distant, sharp exclamation alerted him to another squad narrowing in on their position, drawing a frustrated growl.

Daisukenojo would have been helpful right about now. Hell, a healer of any kind.

'Raiku!' he snapped, shaking her harder. Her head lolled back and forth as she whined in feeble protest. 'Get up and kill people right now or  _so help you_  I'll tell everyone what you are  _and_  I'll tell Uzumaki you have a crush on him!'

She opened her eyes, staring at him in horror.

His own gaze was devoid of pity. 'That's right.  _Uzumaki_ ,' he said, relishing the word.

For a moment she simply couldn't respond, paralysed by the sheer horror of the idea, before she slid an arm under her, pushing free of his support and coming to a wavering standing position. A Chuunin medic landed on her other side, slightly in front.

'Where the hell are our reinforcements?' he asked impatiently, settling into a defensive stance.

Ryuu's expression flattened. 'Hi.'

The Chuunin glanced back at him, dark brown eyes narrowed. 'You've got to be kidding me.'

Ryuu's eyebrows shot up, sending him a venomous look as Raiku swayed, possibly drooling slightly under the mask and looking, in general, more like a recovering coma patient than a ninja. 'Just fix her. Do your job and we'll do ours.'

The medic shot a distracted look at the roofs ahead, at the moment devoid of enemies and took a step towards Raiku, instantly intercepted by Ryuu's hand. 'No,' Ryuu said reprovingly. She suddenly knew  _just_  how he'd sound when telling his children not to touch the stove. 'You don't touch. You heal, you don't touch. Got it?'

The medic gave him a disbelieving look just as Raiku clapped her hands together and pushed her palms to face outwards, sending a jagged wave of electricity crackling through the air. A Sound-nin gave a choked scream, frozen in place as it coursed through their diminutive frame.

Raiku's eyebrows quirked slightly. 'Didn' know I could d' that,' she mumbled dizzily, looking down at her hands like she'd never seen them before. 'Tha's interestin'.'

'Less gawking more fixing!' Ryuu said, giving the medic a sharp tug in Raiku's direction, hands coming together in a series of seals as another, infinitely larger Sound-nin crested the line of roofs and came down towards them, hands ablaze in a taijutsu-centred technique. The shinobi choked, the fire dying on his arms, suffocated as he was now suffocating, sweat breaking out on Ryuu's forehead. 'Toaster,' he gritted out. 'Third... coming from your left.'

Raiku looked right, hastily looking left as she realised her mistake. She squinted at the four opponents heading her way, all oddly identical. 'S'four,' she pointed out.

Ryuu's hand started to shake as the captured, hovering shinobi tried to pull his hands up to form a seal, Ryuu's other hand coming up to complete the seal and snapping the man's arms back to his sides. 'Clones.'

Raiku groaned, casually dropping her hand and pulling her arm back while her fingers clenched into a fist that hurtled forward towards the foe, stepping forward and throwing her weight into the blow, elbow almost getting the medic in the eye as he hastily twisted to avoid touching her.

The shinobi in the air was turning purple by the time two of the shadow clones of his teammate met an ugly demise, the other two approaching figures jumping to sprint at her along the wall of the hospital, brandishing shuriken that narrowly missed all but her pretty unfortunate and already injured leg.

She stumbled back and drove her palm into the bricks, sweat breaking out on her forehead as she relied less and less on, well, blood to power her and more and more on everything else. The paint turned black and cracked as lightning ripped across it, demolishing the first shadow clone and reaching for what had to be the real shinobi.

The 'real' shinobi exploded similarly into smoke and Raiku dimly heard Ryuu cursed as a wave of water greeted her when she turned to look at him, slamming into her tiny frame and submerging her instantly, glowing briefly and brilliantly as the creator shrieked in agony, planning to attack from above and disrupting what had, unfortunately, not been a technique on Raiku's part. Raiku gasped and fell to her knees as the water came crashing down to the ground around her, drenching the cement and sending a wave of ionised water over the medic's legs. Skin painted a sickly, running pink with streaks of darker red, Raiku fell to hands and knees.

'Am I done?' she asked, voice strangled and pleading. 'Am I done?'

The Sound-nin dropped lifelessly to the ground in front of Ryuu, legs cracking and skull smacking down onto the ground with a crunch. Ryuu nodded, hands shaking and unable to be relaxed from the virtual claws the strain had forced them into. 'Yeah, toaster. Yeah. You're… you're done.'

Raiku obligingly- finally- collapsed into a heap in front of the hospital. Ryuu sagged and sank into a kneeling position, rubbing a hand over his face and smearing blood over the skin around his eyes. Raiku blinked sluggishly, contorted limbs finally relaxing as the power finally got the idea and drew back as much as it was able, blurred vision taking in the sight of a familiar woman in a white coat rushing towards her, another with a stretcher just behind.

She closed her eyes and fell asleep.


	29. ultralit and good intentions

Raiku did not often dream. But stuck in a comfortable, medicine-scented haze in the warm dark was proving to be an acceptable substitute. When she was aware enough to take in the pictures and sounds her brain provided for subconscious entertainment she found herself in the middle of nowhere. Standing on water, without chakra or sinking, she looked around her, taking in the faintly salty breeze that lightly lifted her hair from her face and the complete absence of land or people in either way. The water simply stretched on without break or disturbance for as far as she could see, under a sky with faint white clouds failing to obscure the gentle sunlight, and as she looked down into the impenetrable blue depths she saw lightning spread and flicker outwards from her feet, oddly whole instead of diffusing. She smiled to herself faintly crouching down and running a bare hand over the wet surface and watching electricity spread from each fingertip and follow the movement, pulling back a wet hand none the worse for wear.

She looked back down with detached curiosity; tilting her head and watching her reflection do the same. And if she tilted enough, and moved her knee, she'd be able to see her own face without self-consciousness or embarrassment, because it was just her, wearing pale, simple clothes and no masks. But when she shifted the water clouded and evaporated and she was gone, back into the simple dark and the lingering smell of antiseptic.

 

 

 

 

When she was aware for the first time after the upheaval of Konoha, someone was screaming and lights were flashing, hurting her eyes as it traded from bright to dark too quickly for her to be able to adjust. There was a glow and a frightened rush of light because there were hands everywhere and she wasn't telling it what to do  _why wasn't she telling it what to do?_  She didn't really know and she could have sworn she was- wasn't she? It was confusing and tiring but she didn't want to hurt anyone so _why …_?

She fell asleep before she could find out what was going on.

 

 

 

 

 

The next time she woke up she was far more aware, but in a lot more pain. Her head ached dully, the pain putting pressure on the back of her eyes and radiating outwards down her neck. She grumbled and screwed her eyes further shut, arm moving to rub her temple. Only she wasn't, because there was something on her arm that was stopping her, keeping it firmly anchored to something else. She tried the other and found it similarly inconvenienced. She twitched when a piece of hair blew over onto her forehead- bare forehead, when had that happened?- and tried to send it back from whence it came by tilted her head slightly.

She wrinkled her nose when that failed, brow furrowing in annoyance. She heard a faint sigh and something brushed over her forehead, the familiar texture of fabric sending the hair back to the side.

'Nuisance,' someone muttered. They raised their voice slightly. 'Are you awake?'

Her nose itched, moisture collecting in the corners of her eyes before she sneezed explosively. She groaned slightly as the movement forced sore abdominal muscles to contract and eased herself back onto the bed with exaggerated care.

'I'll take that as a yes.' Alright. Only one person would treat the infirm with such flippancy. Ryuu was here.

She opened her eyes to pure white. Well, mostly pure. Actually, now that she could try and focus her eyes, it was sort of oddly patterned… okay, it was a bandage. Why were there bandages over her eyes?

'Your …  _thing_  freaked out when you were healing and the wattage in your eyes shot up. It lit up the room through your eyelids and it kept the other patients awake, so they bandaged you up.'

She hadn't realised she'd been speaking out loud. That was a little embarrassing. She usually prided herself on her self-awareness (when it came to everything but speech). She shifted her captured arm listlessly, silently asking for yet another explanation.

'What, the arm thing?'

She nodded feebly, swallowing.

'When they tried to fix you up, no one from your family had gotten here yet. So they try to patch you up the normal way, skin and everything, you did… what you do, and exploded. You hurt a few people, I think you killed one. Or almost killed, I didn't really pay attention. Medics piss me off, so I was really just happy to hear some good news.'

Raiku made a feeble sound of acknowledgement. Or maybe it was annoyance. She wasn't quite sure at this point.

'Anyway,' Ryuu sighed. 'They thought you might have been doing it on purpose, so they settled on soft cuffing you to the bed. Then, when you barbecued even  _more_  people and set off the fire alarms when their clothes burst into flame, they figured out it  _wasn't_  you being a bitch, primarily because you were fucking unconscious, the morons-'

Raiku twitched.

She could  _feel_  Ryuu rolling his eyes. 'I swear. Deal with it.  _Continuing_. So then they covered you up and pretty much wasted all the chakra they had on hand to heal you without having to touch you by stitching you up, etcetera. Then they splinted you when the casts and traction failed because you started a  _fire_ -'

It seemed a little farfetched that she could cause all this trouble without being awake for it.

'…And here we are. Or here I am, because when the flower boy showed up his mother chewed him out for getting caught in the stadium genjutsu and not being around to protect you. 'Course, even if he had been awake he wouldn't have been much help, since he's not really built for our brand of last-ditch travel.'

Raiku felt a little like saying that she wasn't either, but accepted the implied compliment.

'He should be back soon. Anything else…? Yes. Yamada's in the maternity ward. His kid is the creepiest thing ever. I swear, if I didn't know better, I'd say his mother's genes staged a hostile takeover and eliminated all traces of Yamada DNA.'

She paused, letting that sink in and quietly drawing conclusions. '…I'm pretty beat up, huh,' she croaked painfully, wincing as her dry throat protested loudly.

Ryuu clicked his teeth. 'Yep. How'd you guess?' he asked sarcastically.

'You only talk this much… when someone's hurt.'

She heard him snort. 'Guess so. Oh, and you've got the stupid mask on since someone from your family  _eventually_  got here, spouting some bullshit about how they thought you'd died already. Want it off? Or do you want the bandages off your eyes? One or the other.'

'Bandages… please.'

'No way. You're unhealthy for the other patients. They stay on.'

She frowned. 'But you just... What other patients?'

Ryuu paused.

She heard him start to chuckle.

'You'll see. But I could let your arms out, if you want.'

'I want-'

'Wait, no, you'd probably kill us all. Right, right. I forgot about that. You're just a violent killing machine. Ferocious and deadly.'

Now he was just making fun of her.

She frowned, even though with all but her forehead fully hidden he wouldn't have been able to tell. 'Ryuu…' she began wearily, hearing a bit of a whine creep into her voice, flinching as her fingers twitched, starting to wake up and clearly incredibly unhappy about it.

He made a disapproving sound. 'Want more painkillers?'

'…No…'

'Are you sure?'

She considered this point, conceded defeat because really, who was she trying to impress here, and nodded sadly.

She heard the slide of fabric against fabric and a faint click. Something brushed over her forehead. 'See you on the other side, toaster.'

She dimly registered the sound of a door sliding. 'Did you just- stop that! Toaster, you still with me here?... Damn it, Ryuu!'

'People who are in  _pain_  want pain _killers_ , halfwit. She asked me to!'

'Sure she did, bastard! You just want her to think I didn't show up!'

'Look, you freckled-faced, pint-sized moron, I've got better things to do than-'

Falling asleep to the familiar sound of the bickering of her teammates, Raiku found herself in a large space, with nothing but perfectly still water and an endless sky.

 

 

 

 

 

It was in the very, very early morning or maybe just very, very late at night when she was next woken. For a while she simply lay awake without registering anything had changed, sending pale light into the moonlit room from gradually focusing eyes. She slowly moved an arm and was content with the restored range of movement, twisting her wrists to test the restored bone and sliding a foot up to bend her knee. Quietly satisfied, she turned on her side towards the window, happy to fall asleep again.

'Gairano... Raiku.'

Alright. Equaliser. There would be no falling asleep. If she could throw herself off the bed and yank it up to use as a shield as she did so, that would give her enough time to set off the alarm-

'Don't... worry.'

If an Equaliser could betray emotion, it would have been amusement in this instance.

She blinked, caution evident.

The Equaliser turned towards the window, looking out over the village. 'Your ... exploits ... are eclipsed... by the day. You... live.'

'That's... nice,' she said, a faint wheeze barely audible in her voice. So the nigh-destruction of Konoha gave her a get-out-of-Equaliser-free card? Killing one of their own would be ignored?

A low sound. She couldn't tell what it would have been without the mask. 'And... Your wishes... for the other... A-Motive?'

She tried to think. It was Mura. Mura was not her responsibility anymore- she had no right to determine her fate. And as much as she wanted revenge, it would be stupid to exact it now.

She'd had enough. She couldn't take responsibility for Mura's life. It was too heavy, and dragged her down with a weight she couldn't understand. That she might never understand.

'Not your business,' she said, shifting her pillow and getting comfortable.  _Or mine._

The silhouette of the Equaliser showed their nod, standing against the backdrop of Konoha. '...Understood.'

A sliver of yellow light fell upon the wall, the glass pane in the door lit up from behind as the night staff prepared to do their rounds again. When she looked back, the Equaliser was gone.

She paused for a moment, then turned and screamed into her pillow, shoulders shaking as the tension she hadn't realised was building was abruptly released. A low groan alerted her to the presence of another patient in her room and she immediately stopped and with shaking hands, replaced her pillow. With a sort of hysterical amusement, she noticed that there was no heart monitor connected to her, and because it was either laugh or cry, she was laughing as she fell into the dark.


	30. broken ribs and plot devices

'Four of hearts,' Daisukenojo grinned.

'No fair,' Raiku whimpered. 'I can't even hold my cards.'

'You have a spare hand, don't you?'

'Yeah, but you need two to play this game! Who wanted to play Snap anyway!?'

'Sorry,' Sakura apologised sheepishly. Raiku had been dragged painfully into a seated position for this visit, abdomen pain settling into a dull burn and her various lacerations stinging in the air conditioned air. 'I learned how to play on our mission to Mist, and no one's agreed to play me since I got back.'

'So you thought the invalid would be a good choice?' Raiku asked, gingerly putting down a card. She yanked her injured wrist away with a shriek as two more able hands slammed down on the pair, making her bed dip alarmingly.

Sakura smirked, tucking the pile under the cards she already had. Raiku looked down at her two remaining cards with a depressed expression. 'I am not good at this game.'

'Don't worry, Ryuu's beating me too,' Lee called from his side of the room, cheerful despite the superior stack of cards Ryuu was hoarding, younger boy currently shuffling.

'I'm lucky,' Ryuu passed off, despite the fact Raiku knew damn well he could cheat at Beat your Neighbour.

'He can't move his arms!' Raiku protested in Lee's defence. 'Cut him some slack!'

'Well, we could always invite a teammate of his to help him,' Ryuu shot back.

Raiku glared at him. He smirked, clearly aware he'd won. 'That's what I thought.'

She looked down, realised it was her turn and put a card down, exhaling in relief when it wasn't a pair.

'That's me out,' she said, smiling and wincing at the same time. 'Shame.' She began to edge her legs off the bed. 'I... might go and take a walk...'

'You can't walk!' Sakura was scandalised. 'You can barely move!'

Raiku's feet hit the cool linoleum, legs shaking slightly as she wobbled. 'Totally,' Raiku muttered distractedly, more to herself than the rosette. 'Can.' She grabbed the edge of the bed hurriedly as she threatened to topple over, bracing herself.

'You had a broken knee!' Sakura raised an eyebrow. 'How did you break your knee, anyway?'

Raiku had brief visions of hurtling through the air, but quickly shook them off. That was quite impossible. 'Don't really remember- the whole day's a blur.'

'If you see my teammates, can you tell them I'm awake, Raiku?' Lee asked hopefully.

Raiku visibly wilted.

'I don't think that-'

'I'll go with you to find them,' Daisukenojo volunteered immediately, colouring when everyone looked at him askance. Excuse to see Tenten?  _Probably_. The red haired boy got to his feet, gripping Raiku by the upper arm. He was a little taller than her now, but far from catching up to Ryuu- at average height for a boy their age, while Raiku remained gawkish and too long for a girl, all limbs and spindly fingers. She found herself propelled forcefully out of her hospital room, yelping as her IV caught on the doorway and yanked her back, resulting in several embarrassing minutes of entrapment, bound up in tubing, as Daisukenojo pulled her free (by ripping her IV out of her hand and almost de-masking her).

'Back later!' Daisukenojo called into the room, slamming the door behind him.

'I don't want to find Lee's team!' Raiku wailed, stumbling as he pulled her behind him down the white hallway, her feet confused and leg still throbbing in pain. She almost fell and saved herself by clinging to Daisukenojo's sleeve, almost ripping his shirt in the process. 'They hate me!'

' _Hyuuga_  hates you,' he corrected.

'That's what I said!'

'How badly can he hate you? You called him a girl  _once_.' He snickered at the memory.

Raiku paled, face matching her hair, mask and clothes, now the only source of colour her eyes. But this would be the first time she'd seen him since he'd found out about her, and if she pissed him off he might go back on his word! And she was guaranteed to piss him off! Always did, it was like a Plot of its-

Her eyes widened. 'No way!' she exclaimed in horror. She slammed into Daisukenojo's back as he stopped, and he admirably only staggered a little. Granted, Raiku weighed less than your average ten year old, but she still thought it was a neat trick.

'What the hell?!'

'It was nothing!' she said hurriedly, hands gripping his shirt to stop her from falling over, effectively leaving her to clamber all over him as he struggled to turn around. 'Keep walking!'

'Get the hell off me!' he sputtered, trying to get a solid grip on her to pull her off as she hung precariously off him, trying to keep her balance as well as trying to avoid his skin.

'I can't, stop moving!'

'You're the one that's throwing me off! You're making a scene!'

'Maybe if you stopped struggling-!'

She looked up to see nurses and patients alike stopped in the halls to stare at them, and flushed.

'Walk!' she ordered hurriedly.

'I can't see!'

'Try it anyway!' she said, voice rising into hysterical pitch.

'Aren't you the Gairano in ward three...?' she heard someone ask with growing suspicion.

Daisukenojo about-faced, staggering in the opposite direction. She tried to lower herself down to the floor slowly, eyes almost ripping the walls apart to search for a Plot.

She twisted to check her back, hearing something crack ominously. But the crippling pain was worth seeing the flicker of black as the Plot hurriedly scurried over to somewhere she couldn't see it. Her skin crawled, hair crackling as live current ran through her skin.

'Stop that!' Daisukenojo yelped, mild shocks jolting him every now and again.

She contorted as Daisukenojo made it to the stairs, groping blindly at the walls as her arm wrapped around his face to cover his eyes. 'Get it off me get it off me!'

'That's what I was going to say!' he growled.

His foot caught on the first step, and as they fell through the air, something occured (occurred) to Raiku. Her life was suicidal.

She screamed as they rolled down the stairs, sharp edges slamming into her ribs and tangled limbs, leaving Daisukenojo behind as he managed to brace himself enough to stop and she continued on, rolling an extra few feet past the foot of the stairs to lie sprawled on the linoleum of the lobby. She blinked woozily, squinting to try and make the ceiling stop moving.

'Toaster!' She heard hurried footsteps. 'Toaster, can you hear me!?'

'Yes?' she offered uncertainly, lifting a hand to her hairline, bringing back the red-stained glove.

Daisukenojo sighed in relief, dropping and letting his hand hover over her head.

'Don't cling to me again, got it?' he asked, warmth flooding Raiku's face and bringing a flush to her cheeks as the injured flesh knitted itself together again.

'Got it,' she sighed contentedly.

'Hatori?' a high female voice asked. '... Gairano? Why am I not surprised to see you here?'

'On the floor?' she inquired.

'Injuring yourself in a place of healing,' Tenten corrected.

Raiku felt the Plot wriggle up along her collarbone to stare her in the face, gloating triumphantly.

'Neji?' Tenten called. 'Can you help me? She's staying in Lee's room anyway!'

She lurched upwards, gripping Daisukenojo. 'That's fine! I'm fine!' She gasped and lost all colour as what felt suspiciously like her previously broken rib acting up again sent a jolt of agony through her system. 'Really,' she forced out in a squeak.

'We were just coming to look for you,' Daisukenojo said to Tenten, forcing nonchalance, studiously avoiding eye Plot grasped her neck and tried to yank her back down to wait for Neji. She struggled valiantly, finally ripping free and into a wobbly standing position. She threw her arms up in triumph, inadvertently almost removing her dislocated shoulder in the process.

Obligingly, her legs gave out again.

She eyed the stairs and started to pull herself along the linoleum, making slow, agonising progress. After she'd pulled herself a few inches, someone gripped each side of her waist and pulled her up abruptly.

'No!' she whimpered. 'I can make it! I  _will_  make it!'

Her shoulder was yanked savagely up and back, popping as it jolted back into place. The room spun as Daisukenojo released her arm and Neji threw her over his shoulder.

'I think I'm going to throw up,' she croaked.

Neji's grip tightened.

'Don't you dare.'

'I'll electrocute you!'

' _Try me_.'

The Plot on her back made a sound distinctly reminiscent of smugness.


	31. dislocations and hospital floors

This was both humiliating and inhumane. As if the knowing, somewhat smug look that she just knew would be on Sakura's face –  _go ahead and laugh, pinky, you're probably going to end up with Naruto_ \- wasn't bad enough, Neji's shoulder was not exactly comfortable and her broken ribs were submitting complaints about its suitability as an environment.

Luckily, he then shifted and her stomach took the brunt of the pain- substantial pain, actually, since she'd done god knows what to her spine and internal organs.

She settled for wheezing indignantly at the Plot currently patting her head sympathetically. Murder wasn't an option.

 _Yet_.

Daisukenojo was, of course, quite content. He was talking to Tenten- actually talking, mind you, instead of the usually incoherent muttering- and she appeared to be enjoying herself. While casting looks at Raiku out of her peripheral, yes, and sometimes at Neji. Raiku reflected on the injustice of using Daisukenojo to make someone jealous, and resolved to quietly and discreetly do what she could for the redhead.

Not for Tenten though. Tenten was for Neji.

Neji's grip on her leg tightened painfully as the gap between the waistband of her pants and the bottom of her bandages grew slightly bigger with the repetitive movement. His damnably clever ears picking up the low, warning crackle of electricity preparing to thoroughly  _encounter_  him.

'Well there's not much I can do about it, is there!' she hissed, trying to keep her voice from reaching Daisukenojo and Tenten's ears. She elbowed him, unwisely. Neji visibly tensed. She could actually even feel him tense through the fabric and pain, which was infinitely more alarming. 'It's not like it's my  _hobby_. You knew what you were getting into when you picked me up!'

Against my will, she added sullenly, in what she was relatively sure was the safety of her own mind. The idea of Neji being able to read minds was so incredibly horrifying that she would go missing-nin just to get away.

'But seriously,' she said, after a few moments of terrified reflection. 'I think I'm going to throw up. From fear. Or pain, maybe. But I'm definitely going to-'

Success! She was on the white-tiled ground so quickly she could barely register it had happened at all! And Neji was continuing to move away, down the equally white, sunlit hallway, Daisukenojo and Tenten pausing nearby to look down at her.

'Did you call him a girl again?' her teammate asked, trying valiantly to hide a grin.

She shrugged, as though to imply not only that she didn't know, but that his motives were equally unknown and this situation could be but probably was not her fault.

Wise to her game, Daisukenojo lent her a hand in getting up, chivalrously ignoring her sharp intake of breath and slight wobbling. 'Go ahead,' she wheezed, waving them on. 'I'll catch up.' She braced her hands on her legs, bend over to pretend to catch her breath.

Daisukenojo looked at her.

 _I know what you're doing_ , the look told her in no uncertain terms. She was taken aback at the sudden, obvious outlining of body language.  _But I'm going to let you get away with it because Tenten is so very, very hot._

She boggled as he shrugged and continued on, with nary a second glance from Tenten.

After they'd progressed far enough along the hallway, she walked- slid, really, possibly even oozed- towards the stairwell.

With the eye she was using to keep an eye on them, she saw Neji tense.

She oozed mournfully along after them.

 

 

 

 

 

It was clever- she'd grant it that. One of the more clever ones, she'd agree, grudgingly. Downright dastardly wasn't out of the question, but perhaps a bit over the top and somewhat of an affront to her pride. It was not, however, a particularly humble Plot, and was currently gloating at her from behind Neji's left shoulder. This of course, gave her an excuse not to look directly at him- or would have, she reflected glumly, if anyone else knew what it was or could even see it.

It wasn't her fault she hadn't known it was there- how much time, on average, did most people really spend staring at their backs?

At least she'd hoped it had just been on her back. The alternative didn't bear thinking about. But as long as the Plot was keeping out of reach, she wasn't yet nimble enough to catch it and get its hooks out of her. No- she was a character.

 _For now_.

But in the world of reality, Neji was conversing quietly with the nigh-ecstatic Lee, while Daisukenojo attempted awkward conversation with Tenten.

She wondered, from her hospital bed, how long this crush of his was going to go on. It was clear that Tenten was for Neji, just as it was becoming increasingly obvious that Ryuu had no intention of getting a girlfriend and was doomed to have some sort of dramatic Plot all of his own (and that Raiku was probably going to have to change teams).

On that note, she was actually starting to wonder if Ryuu was gay-

Ryuu's head snapped towards her, eyes narrowed into malevolent yellow slits. She jerked back reflexively, and ceased wondering about his sexuality immediately, electing instead to think about deliberately non-phallic clouds. Suspicions apparently eased, Ryuu stopped looking at her and resumed watching Daisukenojo and Tenten with barely concealed amusement.

Raiku shook her head slightly, eyeing him. He was certainly one to watch. And if she'd observed correctly, as she sped past in her usual flight of terror, people were watching him. Well, females. Females from their class were watching him. Apparently unfazed by the fact he was barely a teenager and in all likelihood a sadist, girls were actually…  _interested_.

If that wasn't a sad confirmation of the self-destructive nature of man, Raiku didn't know what would be. And as an eluder of narrative, she liked to think she could recognise that sort of tragedy. Given the thought of girl talk made her feel ill, she should try and avoid it at all costs if this were the case: the last thing she wanted to be subjected to was an in depth discussion on Ryuu's… attributes.

She shuddered.

Ryuu's attributes.

That was  _one_  conversation no Plot could pull her into… Regardless of whether or not that was true, she felt better for thinking it.

But back to the issue at hand. The Plot waved at her beguilingly, giving her snatches of sound which, coupled with odd contortions, looked highly disturbing, especially when juxtaposed against the statuesque dignity of the Hyuuga. She tried to look at it nonchalantly, found that it was impossible to do out of the corner of her eye, and settled for looking at it with an expression of mild conspicuousness.

Which Sakura couldn't help but notice, of course. Raiku first became aware of  _that_  problem when something pointy and painfully indiscreet nudged her in a broken rib. In serious pain and thus seriously contemplating the benefits of suicide, she looked over and down at her new… friend? Was friend the word…? Yes, friend.

Sakura looked gleeful, which was her first clue something was wrong. The second clue was when the pink haired girl leaned in, looking over Raiku's shoulder as she ignored Raiku trying to lean back, desperate to preserve her personal space.

The third and final clue was when Raiku realised, Sakura almost sitting on her and breath fanning across her neck uncomfortably, that the other girl was looking at Neji. It would have been too much to hope Sakura had had a sudden epiphany and was looking at the Plot- it was definitely Neji.

'You're busted,' Sakura half-grinned half-smirked.  _That_  was a familiar expression; she must have been spending too much time with the Uchiha.

'Busted?' Raiku hedged, a mantra starting up in her head.  _Please don't think what I think you think, please don't think what I think you think…_

'You like him!' Sakura hissed, pushing her in what was probably a playful way but in this instance was excruciating. Raiku sucked in a sharp breath as black spots danced across her vision, head spinning.

'Toaster?' Daisukenojo asked, breaking away from his fledgling conversation briefly. 'You alright?' His freckled face was concerned. Conversation died as Lee looked over in concern, thus ignoring Neji, who in turn looked over as well, thus giving Ryuu nothing to watch in amusement and making him do the same.

'I'm fine,' she wheezed into the silence. 'Just… Just fine.'

'My fault!' Sakura waved them off. 'It's okay.'

After a few minutes of suspicious quiet, they turned back to their respective conversation partners.

'Is this room crowded?' Raiku wondered to Sakura, desperately trying to change the subject. 'I think I should get some-'

'Don't even  _try_  changing the subject, it's not gonna work.'

Evidently Ryuu wasn't the only one who could read minds. Raiku sagged back into her pillows, quietly wanting to die. Sakura, apparently taking this as consent, rested her elbow on the edge of the bed, near Raiku, and proceeded to smile up at her devilishly. 'So,' she began in a whisper. 'You like Neji?'

'No,' Raiku said in equally low tones. She tried to literally force the word into Sakura's mind through sheer force of will. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't working. When did it  _ever_  work?

'Why are you staring at him?'

Raiku had no reasonable response to this. 'I think he's mad at me… again,' she attempted.

'Why?' Sakura frowned. 'Is this  _still_  about the "girl" thing?'

Raiku started, staring at her. 'How does every-' no, she decided abruptly. She didn't want to know. '…No,' she settled for. The idea of her every mistake being known of by her peers was terrifying. 'When we went looking for them, Daisuke and I fell down the stairs, and… he ended up carrying me back here,' she finished in a grumble. There. She wasn't proud, but there it was. 'He gets annoyed with me whenever I do something stupid. Like Ryuu,' she added in dark afterthought.

'So he was… worried about you?'

Raiku shook her head. 'I bled on his shirt.'

Sakura sighed wearily, resting her chin on her palm. 'Sometimes I wonder if normal boys are like this.'

'They're not,' Raiku deadpanned, spindly fingers absently picking at a stray thread in her blanket, worrying at it until it came free. 'Most of my family's civilians, so I can be pretty sure.'

'Yeah.' Sakura rolled her eyes. 'I bet they're not as interesting, though,' she added, brightening slightly.

'Boring's good,' Raiku sighed wistfully.

'Why?' Daisukenojo asked incredulously. To her credit, Raiku didn't shriek. But it was a testament to her complete lack of commendable abilities that she hadn't noticed the sudden lull in conversation.

'It's… easy to live with?' she offered, eyeing him.

'Easy's boring,' Ryuu said. It… seemed really pointed, actually, did he have two meanings? She may never know, she decided.

'Exactly!' she replied happily. 'You get it!' The corners of her electric eyes crinkled.

'Your family's got some messed up values,' Daisukenojo grimaced, the freckles on his face shifting into strange patterns as the muscles under them creased into the expression.

She watched with something like fascination. 'Sure,' she replied eventually, not bothering to raise her voice despite his stance across the double room. 'But… they're my family.'

Neji just looked at her with his blank eyes that for the first time, weren't saying anything, and she wondered at the illness coiling in her gut while she continued. 'Besides,' she added, bright eyes creasing. 'Shinobi are always really dramatic, right?'

Ryuu snorted, lean form leaning back in his chair as he folded his arms. 'Yes,' he said meaningfully, eyeing her. She flushed correspondingly. 'They are.'

She really had to have that conversation with her father soon, she decided with an uneasy, confused smile as Sakura started to berate Ryuu with surprising ease and familiarity, the twin voices rising in volume with their tempers. She couldn't afford to keep getting trapped in these Plots.

Maybe, she considered with a sigh, she should move.


	32. burning out

'We're not moving,' her father denied flatly. He stood at the foot of her hospital bed with his arms folded stubbornly across his lean chest, giving her a cold glare.

Raiku looked at him pleadingly, beseeching, and not least because he kept smacking the backs of her hands away from her bandages. Her open injuries had reached the "it itches because it's healing" stage and she had very little impulse control. 'But it's following me!' Her eyes, she reflected, weren't the best for this.

She widened them anyway, sticking out her lower lip, for all the good it'd do under the mask- _the fucking mask-_  she pulled herself up short. Her father frowned in grudging concern as she cringed. 'Something wrong?'

'I can't stay here,' she begged, clasping long, bandaged hands together. 'Please, I can't! I'm starting to not like my mask and getting angsty about it and thinking about boys and nothing's,' she gestured vaguely at herself, 'acting up so I think I'm in danger, dad, and I want to go home!' she ended on a sob for good measure.

He stared at her like she was an emotional time bomb. Rather than the literal one he was used to dealing with. He leaped into action the second her eyes started shining, pretty much clambering over to her side and putting a hand on hers, seating himself gingerly on the edge of the bed. 'Raiku,' he said with equal parts reassurance and borderline hysteria. 'Raiku, honey, don't cry.' He patted her hand uncertainly after a pause.

She sniffed pathetically, pulling her other hand up to carefully try and dispel the moisture. Mostly because it could have disastrous consequences, but also because it was undignified. 'I'm not crying,' she muttered. Gairanos didn't cry.

Neither did shinobi, she reminded herself belatedly.

'Look, Raiku,' he said gently, awkwardly, shifting slightly. 'Everything's going to be alright. We can take care of this,' he stressed, leaning forward slightly. 'There's a large event coming up,' he said, dropping his voice and looking to the door cautiously.

Raiku nodded desperately. That could be handy.

'So we're about to lose… a lot of people,' he hedged.

She nodded again, listening intently.

He winced. 'And in your condition…'

Her blood ran cold, her heart stopped. 'Dad?' she volunteered uncertainly, swallowing hard.

'You'd be temporarily put into a Plot we made for you,' he continued, looking as though he had to force the words out of an unwilling throat. 'You couldn't be a shinobi anymore, but,' he added hastily. 'You'd be able to touch people.'

'What do you want to do to me?' she whispered, trying to distance herself from someone she no longer recognised.

'Please, Raiku, I'm trying to keep you alive!' He dropped his head, swallowed hard before he went on. 'You'd save lives, honey. But you couldn't be a shinobi anymore. You'd be normal,' he added with emphasis. ' _Normal_. Just like you always wanted.'

And she did want it. She wanted it so much it made her sick and miserable in the middle of the night and crushed her with envy, but every part of her was saying that she couldn't do it, that she couldn't just take it out of her. That it couldn't be that easy. That leaving her team would hurt her more than it was supposed to and that without trying to be a shinobi she wouldn't want to try to be anything else.

She choked on the thought even as it forced its way free.

That she'd turn into Mura.

Numbly she realised she was shaking her head, that she was leaning away and he was starting to look strangely grave. 'We can't keep you out of the Narrative, Raiku,' he said, looking at her with odd intensity. 'We've been trying. You've been trying. But even since we crushed the Hyuuga-' customary curl of his lip, she wondered with sickened horror if she was the same- 'Plot, we've had Mayuko on Runner duty ever since. It can't be maintained.'

'You're trying to burn me out!' she exclaimed, the protest escaping her self-control. She clamped her own hands over her mouth but kept shaking her head. Rock Lee exhaled heavily in his sleep and twitched slightly- they both froze until his breathing once again evened out.

'It's the only way to control this and the only chance you have to be anything but-'

Raiku visibly flinched and her chest constricted. 'A what?' she whispered hoarsely, eyes starting to cloud with tears. 'Anything but what?' she demanded, louder, throat burning. He hissed at her to keep it down, looking over at the mildly Plot ensnared but still dangerous Character Lee.

It was the broken ribs; it was the broken ribs that were hurting. 'They were going to kill me, weren't they?' Oh god, don't. She couldn't understand why she was hurting so much, why she couldn't breathe and why she wasn't  _okay with this_. She always knew she was going to end up like every other Gairano, and from his confused expression, he had too.

But she'd tried so  _hard_ …

'Raiku?' Lee mumbled from the other side of the room, rubbing his face with a fist that failed to obscure his almost suspicious expression at the state she was in. Her father tensed. 'Are you alright?' She was suddenly so glad he knew who she was and cared enough to try and…

And…

She nodded, watering eyes creased at him in a smile. 'No problems, Lee.'

He didn't like it, but he reluctantly nodded, curiously circular eyes moving between them as he started to turn onto his other side. '…Alright then.'

Raiku looked down at her hands, at the faint blue she'd always thought she'd be. She tugged on a piece of her spitefully unkempt white hair and wondered quietly what she'd look like, wondered if she'd miss what she'd never seen when she looked into a mirror for the first time.

But she'd been stupid, and she'd gotten caught up in what wasn't her Plot to deal with. She'd bonded with people she had no right to be anything but disposable towards and she'd made too many mistakes now.

Her fingers started pulling threads from her blanket nervously.

She'd done too much now.

'It's okay,' she mumbled. 'It's okay, dad.' Because he was trying to save her, in his own way. She realised with a low twist in her stomach how afraid he must be, to even try and suggest something that would hurt her so badly.

How much she'd hurt everyone else before this was done.

She sniffed, blinking back moisture with renewed determination. 'It's okay,' she repeated for the third time, steeling herself. She nodded, trying to compose herself. 'I can do it.'

Her father sagged in relief. Or something that wasn't even close but that she had to believe was what she wanted to see if she was going to do this. 'We'll look after you, Raiku.' He smoothed the bandages over her forehead, pressing a kiss to the safer linen. 'You'll be alright.'

She tried not to flinch away.

'I know,' she smiled bravely, almost a wince.


	33. good drugs and rib failures

'I am almost entirely sure that this is unnecessary.'

'I am almost entirely sure that you should shut your face,' Ryuu replied unsympathetically. Raiku boggled in disbelief.  _Boggled_ , like  _that_  was a verb.

'Shouldn't you be helping me escape? Shouldn't I be your favourite right now!?' she demanded.

Ryuu peered around the entrance to the maternity ward cautiously, not bothering to look at her. 'I don't have favourites.'

'We did a technique together! It hurt many people! You like that, that's-,' Raiku's words failed her for a moment, before she rallied magnificently. 'That's a thing that you like! That I helped you do!' Magnificent failure: that was her trademark. 'So… yeah!'

Ryuu rolled his yellow eyes. 'Seeing our teacher's baby is hardly going to be a chore for you, drama queen.'

Raiku sputtered in indignation at his accusation. 'You take that back!'

"If you two don't stop your wailing, I am going to come out there and discipline you, get me!?"

The two of them paled.

There was a short, somehow angry pause.

"Get in here!"

Ryuu glared at her, like this was  _her_  fault somehow, and slunk around the corner. She followed reluctantly.

_Babies._

It suddenly made sense, Daisukenojo's refusal to enter within forty metres of this hospital room.

 _Babies everywhere_.

Raiku stood, paralysed by the overwhelmingly multitudinous swarms of babies and pregnant women sitting in rows. Swarms? Were plural babies swarms? Did it depend on the baby, maybe? Did skulks or embarrassments of babies exist? Were babies like Ryuu skulks all on their own-

Ryuu doubled back and dragged her roughly forward, towards Suzuki's hospital bed.

Raiku mustered up an eye-creasing smile. 'Suzuki-san! You're… glowing!'

Suzuki was glowing, yes, but not in the traditionally maternal way. The ominous circles under her dark eyes were even more pronounced, against her glow-in-the-dark paleness. The baby held in her arms glared at Raiku with similar levels of malevolence. A terrifying aura wafted from them both.

Raiku broke into a nervous sweat.

Yamada, who looked far more exhausted than either his wife or newborn-son? Was that a son? Raiku made a note to check, later- gave her a wide, proud smile. 'Isn't she beautiful?'

Raiku cursed internally. She'd messed this up already. 'She is… she looks a lot like you!' she lied.

She could  _feel_  Ryuu's gaze slowly sliding over to look at her, no doubt scolding her for her terrible lie.  _She was a bad liar and he had known this when he'd brought her here_.

Yamada didn't seem to notice the deception. "I know!" he beamed. "She has my eyes!" On cue, Suzuki offered up the tiny glowering machine, which promptly grabbed onto Yamada's outstretched hand and twisted. Too weak to do any damage but still  _possessed of killer instinct at several days old_ , Raiku noted hysterically, the baby instead chose to munch toothlessly on Yamada's wrist.

"And her mother's tenacity!" he boomed.

Even Ryuu stared at that one.

Suzuki gave Yamada a meaningful look, full of dark threats. Raiku's cheerful demeanour dimmed under the force of the glare he sent them. "Either of you little bastards want to hold her?" he gritted out.

Raiku and Ryuu immediately began spouting hasty denials.

'No!'

'No thank you!'

'I'm not good with babies.'

'I would, but I'm all… crippled.'

'In fact, she should really go back to the ward,' Ryuu interjected.

Raiku instantly forgave him all his previous sins.

He smirked. 'With all the medics fussing over her, though, she'll be back to training in record time.'

Except that one, the filthy traitor.

Raiku eyeballed him with one glowing orb, trying to keep the other on the baby and only succeeding in giving herself a headache.

'Are… you sure?' Suzuki drew out lingeringly. Her 's' sound was particularly long. Ryuu clapped a hand on Raiku's shoulder, so used to the immediate faint shock that he didn't even flinch.

'It was nice to see you again,' he said formally, steering Raiku out.

'Now I kind of  _want_  to hold the baby,' Raiku admitted, looking over her shoulder. The tiny menace was pulling on the scars around Yamada's smiling mouth, while Suzuki overlooked the display with a kind of menacing watchfulness.

'No, no you don't. Because then it would explode, and his wife would make us die with her mind.'

Raiku narrowly dodged a nurse. 'That's why I like you, Ryuu. You have such a poetic way with words.'

He snorted, glancing over his shoulder at her. 'Why are you walking so strangely, anyway?'

She blinked, pointing at herself with two fingers that were splinted together.

'No, the other spiky-haired toaster-face. Yes, you.'

'I'm… not?'

Ryuu glared at her. She hated that look. It meant something bad was going to happen to her limbs. And her bones. Her poor, poor bones. They ached when she remembered their electric hurricane of bonding.

'I'm not!'

'Yeah, you are,' he said stubbornly.

'You did almost shatter my knee, remember!?'

'That happened before I got hold of you,  _remember_?' he glowered, tugging her forward and back into her own room. Rock Lee looked up and waved with one hand casually, so used to their antics by now that he just smiled and kept reading… whatever he was reading, Raiku had never been any good at reading upside-down.

'Do not leave this room until I come back with Freckles, got it?' he said firmly, eyeing her from the doorway.

She held up her splinted hands defensively. 'I'm not!'

He glared.

'I'm not!' she repeated, taking a step back.

After a few more minutes of suspicious glaring, he gave Rock Lee a nod of acknowledgement and closed their door harder than was strictly necessary.

There was a short pause.

'Well, man, it's been great!' Raiku began cheerfully, tugging on her sandals from where she'd hidden them under the bed. Rock Lee frowned at her in concern. 'But Gairano-san! You're still injured!'

'Yeah, well!' she beamed, throwing up her hands. 'What can you do? You can leave, that's what you can do, before your teammates harass you into an early grave.' Or notice things they shouldn't, she added mentally, with a scowl her mask hid perfectly. She finished pulling on her shoes, only to stare at her feet for a moment. The inky black Plot moved sluggishly, sending broken, refracted light out from its oily surface. It was clinging to her legs, but she'd been shuddering to feel it on her back since her father had left it with her. Ryuu had noticed because of  _course_  Ryuu had noticed. He was the Moderate Hindrance in her very own cautionary tale. The Plot was heavy and it made electricity jump inside her nervously wherever it touched her.

Her chest clenched when even thinking about being normal. She would start glowing erratically and sending sparks along her hair, which she hadn't done since she was a child. It did bad things to her hair dye, made her look like a brindle-back… stick insect.

'…Raiku-san?'

Rock Lee's voice interrupted her sickened reverie. She glanced over her shoulder at him in surprise, ignoring the twinge of pain from her ribs. 'Yeah?'

He was watching her with a gaze surprisingly old. She sometimes forgot, like everybody else, just what Rock Lee's own burdens were; she forgot how hard he'd had to work to get where he was, and how much he'd suffered. 'Rock Lee?' she asked, more quietly, when he failed to respond.

After a few pensive moments, he gave her the same blinding smile he usually put on to face the world. 'Nothing.'

She smiled uncertainly back at him through the window of fabric her face was allowed. 'I'll see you out there soon.'

 

 

 

 

 

When she finally got home, her father greeted her the same way he always did when she arrived wheezing, injured and near unconscious.

'Weren't you in hospital?' he asked absently, standing in front of the cupboard and staring into its contents with a serious expression.

'Oh… not for anything serious,' she avoided, trying to sidle towards the hallway while taking her shoes off at the same time.

'…No,' he drew out thoughtfully. 'No, I'm pretty sure it was, when I came to see you.'

The cupboard door was now obscuring his face and, by extension, making it impossible to see her. 'Nurses,' she brushed off with a high-pitched laugh. 'They love to gossip!'

He made a sound of agreement. She relaxed slightly.

Big mistake.

He slammed the cupboard door shut just as she reached the hall, allowing him to get a clear look at her. 'Raiku!'

She shrieked and made a break for the door, her half-removed sandal flapping with each step.

'Get back here!' he yelled from behind her, footsteps thudding through the kitchen just as she broke out into the warm night air.

'I'm not staying there anymore! They poke me with things and I keep getting grabbed by Brooders!' she screamed, leaving sparks in the air behind her. Each deep inhale she took made her chest ache dully.

Given how excruciating it had been a few days earlier, that was an impressive testament to how drugged she apparently was.

'They really gave me the good stuff,' she wheezed, sending pebbles skidding down the incline.

'Raiku!' her father's voice bellowed from the top of the incline to the compound.

She managed to turn a bruising stumble into an agonising roll on the last few feet. 'I love you very much see you tomorrow I'll be at a friend's house!' she got out in a single, unbroken yell.

Almost ten exhausting minutes later, it occurred to Raiku that she had almost no friends. Naturally, this was a bit of a problem, given that she was dressed like a hospital patient and only wearing one shoe.

She took a deep breath and regretted it immediately. She emitted a long, high-pitched sound of pain. 'Ow,' she managed, putting a hand to her ribcage. Her ribs had had enough. No drugs were worth this kind of torture. They were bound and extremely displeased. Even that pressure made her squeak again, trying to inhale as shallowly as possible. She was simply not built for sustained endurance. It just wasn't in her nature. Her fragile, cowardly nature that was taking a real beating and wasn't that just so  _unfair_ -

She kicked spitefully at the Plot, oozing its way up her shins, and the self-pity immediately dissipated. Much better. Now, to look at her options.

Ryuu was right out. Daisukenojo? Well, his mother was a medic.

She frowned.

And so just as likely to send her back to hospital. Damnit! Hinata?

She tried to restrain her hysterical laughter, she really did, but even the muffled shaking sent pain rocketing up her spine. When she got light-headed from lack of oxygen, she finally managed to calm herself down.

But seriously now. Sakura? No, she was probably about to lose McBroody, so that wouldn't help anything. Raiku would just get more embroiled and then she might actually end up getting killed to correct the Storyline.

Yamada was at the hospital with his wife (her next choice) and Lee was obviously out of the question. None of Team Nine were her friends; Neji was actually the worst possible choice- short of throwing herself at Naruto and begging to have his babies.

She glared fiercely at the Plot on her leg. It was patting her with a long tendril in what it probably thought was a soothing manner. 'Why can't you do something useful, and get me some help?' she grumbled, hugging her ribs gingerly.

It oozed unhelpfully.

'Of course you can't.'

She slid down against a nearby wall, careful to leave the sight of the street first. It was warm this time of year, even at night, so she could always sleep outside.

And die of infection.

She let her head fall back against the wall in frustration. How was this her life? How was she supposed to get anything right when she had no one to- 'you are being ridiculous!' she snarled, kicking the tenacious Plot off again. It made an unhappy series of vibrations. 'I mean it! Sitting here feeling sorry for myself isn't going to do anything except make me suffer attractively! Which I am physically incapable of doing! Do I  _look_ like I can pull off a Grade Four Brood?' she demanded, kicking it away as it tried to slither back. 'You are going to have to work with me a  _little_  if we're going to get this right!'

It apparently disagreed, dodging her kick and lunging for her yet again, successfully pressing its unpleasant, connotation-laden weight on her pelvis. She gagged, starting to glow around the edges.  _Getitoffgetitoffgetitoff_ -

No! She needed it!

She tried to rein in the electricity starting to shimmer on her skin in waves, but the panic at the Plot's proximity and her rising hysteria only made her failure to make a difference have greater impact. The small side-street began to light up even more intensely, flickering with an eerie blue. In retaliation, the Plot clung more closely to her skin, seeping inside her clothes. She gasped at the overwhelming cold- was this what it was going to feel like? Was this what it felt like to be normal, cold and alone inside her skin with nothing there, with  _just herself and_ -

'Toaster!'

Rapidly approaching footsteps pierced through the growing haze in her mind, forcing her to take a shuddering breath. A worried, freckled face peered at her between the dark spots in her oxygen-deprived vision.

'Daisukenojo,' she gasped, trying to stop hyperventilating. Her electric eyes made his colouring appear more blue and purple than its healthy red, but didn't detract from his obvious concern.

'Calm down, you idiot! We've been looking for you all over!'

'I … don't want… to go back,' she forced out between shuddering breaths.

'Fine! Just… stop doing what you're doing!'

She nodded and screwed her eyes shut, trying to center herself. After an agonisingly long time, sitting in silence, the glow began to dim. When it was at a reasonably disguisable level, Daisukenojo put a cautious hand on her shoulder. 'Better?' he asked warily.

She nodded, curling in on herself slightly. 'I've had a bad week.'

He looked visibly relieved. 'No kidding. Come on, you can stay at my house. My mom knows all about it.'

Raiku highly doubted that.

He hovered awkwardly, not sure how to help her up. In the end they settled for a method known as non-interference, where she got up by degrees and with occasional setbacks and he watched in captivated suspense. His careful scrutiny lasted all the way to his street, where he made her stop a few houses away from his.

He hesitated.

 _Do not be in love with me_ , Raiku prayed silently.

'When you meet my family,' he began slowly. She sagged in relief that was probably uncharitable. 'Don't, uh…' He rubbed a hand through his almost non-existent hair. 'You should…'

Raiku felt this needed hurrying along. 'I … should…'

'They… They can smell fear. You should, uh, remember that.' He finally settled on.

'They can what? They can smell  _what_?!'

'Daisuke!' an androgynous, high-pitched voice shrieked. Raiku almost physically staggered from the sheer force of the sound. From his front gate, there was a growing gaggle of tiny red-haired people, seemingly growing by the second.

Daisukenojo went redder than usual. 'Sanno! Naomi! Get back inside!'

His cheerfully painted front door swung open, making a rectangle of light spill onto the lawn and struggling pile of siblings. 'Everyone inside! You too, Daisukenojo!'

Raiku immediately found herself obeying the woman who was, without a doubt, Daisukenojo's mother. There was something in the harmonics of her voice that just compelled obedience. When she was near enough to see, the very tall, very red-haired woman set her hands on her hips. She fixed Raiku with an unimpressed, calculating stare.

After a few moments of this scrutiny, Raiku began to fidget helplessly.

'I suppose it's too much to ask that you haven't torn any stitches,' his mother said eventually.

'Oh, you're in trou-ble,' a child sing-songed. Daisukenojo immediately hushed them.

Raiku fidgeted in awkward agony, unused to this level of attention from an adult female.

'Answer me!'

'I don't know!' Raiku instinctively ducked and covered her head with her arms. Fingers seized her sleeve and pulled her inside.

'Don't be such a wimp.'

'Daisukeno~jo,' Raiku whined in a futile plea for assistance. He pretended not to see her past the horde of red children, all gawking at her.

'If you have time to stare, you've got time to get ready for bed!'

It was magical. The children immediately vanished, as though by teleportation.

Less wondrously, so did Daisukenojo. Raiku blanched.

His mother turned back to look at her in the better light, a gleam in her dark eyes. 'Now, where shall I start?'

Raiku whimpered.


	34. frolic of terror

The intervening weeks passed with varying levels of success, from the Gairano drama avoidance perspective. The Gairanos' sudden withdrawal from public life was eclipsed by Sasuke's convenient defection and the Sound invasion recovery efforts. As a village, Konoha did not particularly care for them as it was- their family was strange and had a heavy burden of civilians, and they seemed to shuffle along without a clear definition of what being a Gairano even meant. Their sudden recalcitrance was passed off as being a result of family losses during the invasion, which was only partially true.

The reality was that from the inside, family life was rapidly changing. They had lost more people than they had expected during the invasion and they were struggling to mobilise as much of their remaining forces as possible towards the stabilising of Konoha without arousing suspicion. This was in addition to the attention they were already getting for their losses. The handling of the overarching Plot was growing more difficult as it expanded. Her father rarely made it home until the next day, now, and usually was so exhausted that he could do nothing else. They may have been Gairano, but they were also human, and much of their family had died. The fact that they were still a very large family and that they had known about their losses in advance was hardly a comfort when houses stood empty in the squat compound. Grieving wasn't something they could recklessly indulge in, either, as it generated Drama if left unchecked. Unfortunately, so did repressing the matter, which left much of their already strained manpower dedicated to intense grief counselling and gift basket making.

For her part, Raiku was struggling to keep up with what was happening while trying to grapple with the sudden feeling that she wasn't really meant to; everyone had their jobs, and she had hers. Hers was rather simple at the heart of it, though, and where her support would have previously been tolerated, it was now actively suppressed.

She knew, intellectually, that much of what she was feeling was being artificially produced to make her easier to sympathise with, later. For someone as used to being optimistic to the point of causing discomfort in others, though, the weight of such complex emotions was exhausting.

She didn't really blame them, she reflected, staring sullenly out her window during her allotted Brooding time. Brooding was serious business for a shinobi. The average jounin went through dozens of hours a month just to stay intriguing enough to survive a Level Two Plot Twist, though of course, this was largely unintentional. Until her Plot had been seen through to the end, however, Raiku's four hours a week had been upped drastically. She had already been punished for trying to sneak sudoku puzzles into her room, which had been stripped of her tiny broken radios as a result.

She missed them. They made her feel like her room had things in it.

The Plot oozed at her in a disturbingly sympathetic fashion. She eyed it balefully while trying to keep her other eye fixed on the increasingly depressing weather outside and only succeeded into giving herself a headache.

Raiku and the blackened curse had reached a compromise in conjunction with her father. She would do her best to look appropriately distant and brooding, and it wouldn't introduce any further friction until it had to do its wretched thing.

If she squinted very hard and frowned so tightly that her whole jaw ached, she could pull off a slightly constipated Level Two Brood. It was so close to being above mediocre that she'd been generously allowed, after her grafted Plot had been deemed to be attaching nicely, the freedom to go outside during the next autumn storm.

 _Yay_ , she had muttered, receiving a look of weary exasperation from her father in response.

She hated it.

Things were becoming serious and she was barely a teenager, for god's sake. How could she be expected to do this, to-

She savagely cut the thought off and rubbed her face roughly. She wasn't going to think about it. She was going to sit here and wait for the rain, and then...

Raiku's attention was grabbed by the Plot's oily, amorphous mass lurching around in what she felt was a distinctly ominous sign of excitement. Or anger, but the little bastards tended to bite when they got tetchy, so that probably wasn't it. It started emitting short, choppy bursts of sound that made her skin crawl; snippets of voices, of her own voice and ones she knew, raised to different pitches by whatever stress they would one day undergo at the little monster's behest. Cut into jagged vowels, clipped syllables and rendered meaningless but utterly, utterly wrong.

She waved the arm it was attached to and resorted to smacking it against the window when that failed to provoke a response. The little bastard made a wounded sound in her own voice and slithered around her elbow towards her torso to protect itself. 'Oh no you don't,' Raiku growled, scraping her upper arm against the windowsill to dissuade it. 'We had a deal. You stay where I can see you-'

There was a knock on her door. 'Raiku. Your teacher's here,' her father said through the wood, a strained note of cheer in his voice. This was new too. They'd danced around each other for so long as unwitting Plot Device and Gairano family head that they hadn't felt like family until the Sound invasion was over and they realised the distance they had allowed to grow between them.

Raiku frowned. 'He shouldn't be,' she replied, trying to minimise the backlash this deviance from her Genematrix entry schedule would inevitably cause. She held her breath and listened, hoping that would earn her some leeway.

Her father opened the door and gave a helpless shrug, along with a wry smile. This made her drop her guard instantly, having expected more anger. She managed a small, but genuine smile in return, the two simply looking at each other for a moment, before she remembered Yamada's presence and sagged. So much for a peaceful day of brooding. Shoulders still slumped, she dragged herself over to the door and down the hallway, keeping her eyes lowered as she passed her father's raised eyebrows and affectionate grin.

Things were getting better, slowly. She knew her father truly loved her and wanted what was best for her and he knew, he  _knew_  that it was part of the Plot, but a lifetime of habits and secrecy didn't make it any easier for anyone to adjust to suddenly having one attached to a family member. It made it no easier to cater to one, to having to actually actively participate in the behaviours they had so long been conditioned to avoid.

Just inside the door, not even far enough into the house to need to take his shoes off, Yamada beamed at her in a malevolent way, enormous hands set on his hips. Raiku's posture subconsciously straightened under the weight of his dark gaze.

It wasn't  _fair_. He was standing on ground over two feet lower than the rest of the house and she  _still_  had to tilt her head back to even look him in the jaw.

"Speedy, get your shoes! We're going to go  _training_ ," he declared with relish.

Raiku squinted at him. The muscles involved in this were so sore from Brooding that it ached. '…I've been on medical leave.' And so she had. In the chaos that had followed the Sound invasion and the Hokage's assassination, Raiku had been recovering in Daisukenojo's house under the terrifying, hawk-like gaze of the Hatori matriarch. It had gone slowly, probably not helped by the deeply not-restful atmosphere of a house full of insane, walking freckles. Why, oh,  _why_  hadn't she gone to Ryuu's house? Oh, right, she remembered. Because he was convinced she was working to kill herself and was treating her with the kind of bullying watchfulness that was fast becoming his trademark expression of concern. It had taken so long for her knee in particular to heal, in fact, that by the time she had emerged, Sasuke's glorious betrayal and the failed retrieval of his broody, ungrateful self had come and gone.

Yamada's dark eyes gleamed.

"And now you aren't, get me?!" Raiku instinctively tensed when he took a breath, his enormous chest expanding to well over double her width. "Move, move, move!"

The bellowed orders reached her brain before her ears had stopped ringing, without the interference of her higher thought processes, and she found herself scrambling to put her shoes on before she'd really even registered what he'd said. She was relieved, when he'd shouted her outside into the surprisingly chilly air, that the terror she felt whenever he so much as looked at her had abated slightly, somewhere since she'd seen him running from nurses a quarter of his size in a panic.

It was only when Raiku had narrowly avoided being bodily thrown down the steep hill that bracketed the Gairano compound that she came to her senses, digging her heels into the ground so abruptly that she skidded for a few metres before stopping. 'Wait!'

Yamada half-turned towards her, already gearing up to shout her into submission. She threw out her spidery hands in desperate supplication. 'I have a reason! I have a reason!'

When he paused and gave her a suspicious look, she gingerly curled all but the pointer finger of one of her hands towards her palm, leaving the finger pointed directly at the overbearing thunderclouds shifting slowly in the lower atmosphere. His gaze flicked up, then back at her, growing even more suspicious. She immediately cowered and dropped her head. 'I meant that it's going to rain! I didn't do that!'

 _How could she even do that_ , an inner voice grumbled.  _The damn stuff is water_.

Water… her natural enemy. This combined with Yamada, a fine example of her natural predator (from a wide selection of sentient Anythings), was not leaving her feeling optimistic. But  _by god_ , she was going to give it her best shot. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and nodded decisively.

"I can see the damn sky, Speedy!"

Raiku's eye twitched slightly, but her face remained in the largely covered expression of determined cheer she'd pasted on.

"What, you thought I'd forgotten about our little training sessions!?"

Raiku's previously characteristic cheerful face froze in a moment of panic, honestly trying to recall when that had happened. What sessions!? There was nothing about storms in there! Certainly not about-  _he wouldn't_.

Yamada saw the horror dawning in her electric eyes and started chuckling malevolently. The sheer enormity of his ribcage lent the act a complex depth of sound. An appropriately dramatic soundtrack for her impending doom. "That's right, Speedy! We're going to be doing  _special_ training today, get me?"

Above them, power crackled in the dark, low-hanging clouds. The wind had picked up slightly and the temperature dropped a few degrees to signal the impending rain that they could smell clearly in the otherwise oppressively charged air.

Raiku finally took this in, staring at Yamada from her crouching position on the slope. The imminent thunderstorm she'd been given permission to (discreetly) enjoy was suddenly something far more terrifying. 'No,' she tried, voice coming out more as a jagged exhale than a sound. She swallowed dryly and tried again. 'No!'

Yamada gave her a stern look and folded his arms, immune to Raiku's enormous blue gaze of utter pleading. "Get going, Speedy."

After a solid few moments of silent pleading and equally silent refusal, Raiku straightened as slowly as the stereotypical crone she was inevitably going to enrage some day.

Yamada cut her off before she could even take a step. "And in case you're thinking about running…" He nodded meaningfully to someone down the road, towards the training ground.

Yes, Raiku thought with resignation, not even bothering to look. Ryuu  _would_  volunteer for this. With a heavy sigh, she slouched down the hill and drew level with Yamada, who was suddenly all smiles, talking excitedly about the plans he had.

"Throw lightning at it" seemed the main component. But as they grew closer and closer to the long grass of the training grounds and their companion grew more visible, the more the heavy feeling of resigned dread grew in her stomach.

'That's not Ryuu, there,' she muttered to Yamada, gaze baleful.

"Nope."

'…Neither is it Daisukenojo.'

Yamada's beatific smile beamed out at the world through the net of scar tissue that surrounded his mouth. "Nope."

They grew ever closer, the sky above settling into the final moments of stillness, just before a storm.

Raiku's gaze flattened.

'…It is either a girl, or Hyuuga Neji.'

The Plot wiggled joyously on her stomach. Of course. It needed a way to Naruto and the main plot, and why not Neji, who was already involved and knew her? Why not Neji, because  _it was a sociopath_.

Yamada sighed happily, waving at Ryuu and what a merciful god would have made a girl, but now was a coldly staring Hyuuga.

'Why is it Hyuuga Neji, oh god?' Raiku asked the sky sadly.

Yamada answered instead. "Call it payback.  _Imagine_ my surprise when he sees you lit up like a Christmas tree and doesn't bat an eyelid!"

Well, one secret out of the bag.

Raiku slumped down to possibly half her actual size, as though it would save her. Neji nodded respectfully to Yamada when they reached him, falling into pace beside her teacher on the opposite side. 'Yamada-san.'

"Hyuuga," Yamada greeted, rubbing his hands together and casting a critical eye to the sky. "We don't have much time to go over things, so this is what we're gonna do. Speedy, you're going to take off…" he waved a hand vaguely up and down, as though her clothes were too offensive for him to openly identify. "… some of that. Hyuuga's going to use the Byakugan on you and see what's going on while you practice, get me?"

Neji nodded.

Raiku was less clear, remembering to ask a question after she'd spent a few seconds frowning at her clothes in confusion. 'Wait, won't he get blinded?' she asked dubiously, already obediently tugging at the tight leather glove she was wearing.

Yamada seemed pleased. "Good thinking!"

_Yes!_

"But it's taken care of!"

_Damnit!_

"The Byakugan doesn't work  _quite_  like normal vision when activated, so it shouldn't do him any harm."

She could just  _feel_  the look Neji was giving her for daring to doubt his abilities.

She was going to have to bite the bullet. They had already reached the fringe of the training grounds. 'Surely Hinata would be better!?' she tried desperately, aiming for an expression of her genuine unease and only hitting awkward rudeness. It was force of habit, really. There was nothing she excelled so surely at.

There was an affronted silence from Neji, like there was whenever Hinata was mentioned.

"Shut up and get on with it, get me!?"

Raiku sighed heavily and started unwrapping the arm bindings, dragging it out in her reluctance. The cool air made goosebumps stand out on her skin, but nothing as spectacular as last time she'd been exposed near a Hyuuga. Neji's careful scrutiny and the flare of chakra that no doubt signalled the Byakugan activation made her feel oddly naked, but … it was just her arms.

She paused slightly, then finished one arm and moved to the next as she simultaneously toed off her shoes. But… when was she going to get this chance again? Neither Yamada nor Neji really cared, though Neji thought she was a 'thing' rather than a person and loathed her. A low sound and sporadic drops of rain marked the beginning of the downpour. She felt, rather than heard, the rumbling in the clouds above, and the tell-tale rush of excitement that always accompanied it.

In the only surge of recklessness she'd yet allowed herself to experience, Raiku reached up and yanked her mask down to pool around her neck, a sharp breath forced from her from both the unfortunate knowledge that she'd regret it and the first drop of rain hitting her skin and shining.

Fortunately, Yamada had no sense of ceremony.

"Spark up, Speedy!"

Like it worked that way. But seconds later it may as well have, the deluge starting and sending walls of rain thudding downwards into them at the signal of a thunderous crack.

Raiku flashed into life like a lightning bolt.

Yamada shaded his eyes and squinted until the flare died down, leaving her sparking.

It wasn't serene. More Plot-important people, when they shone, shone with gentle, shining light, or waves of consistent darkness. Raiku wasn't like that. It wasn't nearly so inspiring.

In fact, he noted with exasperation, it was kind of weird.

Raiku didn't notice through the rush of adrenaline and fierce  _joy_ , but the electricity on her skin was flaring up at each new point of contact as well as shimmering in the water running down in rivulets, making her alternately spotted and striped in disturbing patterns.

Yamada cast a glance to Neji, whose veins around the eyes were distended in the trademark tell of Byakugan use, his gaze intense and unblinking.

He said nothing.

Yamada internally lamented at Raiku not sharing her secret with a more experienced user.

The charge on Raiku was building slowly. She could feel the electricity bouncing under her skin and seeping out of her pores to gleefully meet freedom. The hair plastered to her face and neck crackled with energy. It felt like being too big for her skin, too much for her body. It felt like being separate from her spidery limbs and constant foot-in-mouth, the Plot she carried so reluctantly to her fate.

She closed her glowing eyes and let the charge build and build to a growing crescendo and felt at peace for a moment that could only have been a fraction of a second, but that stilled her constantly racing heart and the energy she felt always bouncing off her insides.

"Go!" Yamada barked.

Raiku opened her eyes and her restraint and the world split in half for a moment with a crack of thunder that shook the earth and drove Neji a step back, leaving both his and Yamada's ears ringing violent. Underlying it was the euphoric shout Raiku couldn't restrain that rushed out of her with everything else, half-laughter. She couldn't stop herself from leaping into the air and darting from place to place, bolts of lightning chasing her and scorching, cracking the earth whenever it missed her.

Yamada took this terrifying, uncoordinated frolicking in with stoic deafness. Neji looked deeply ... something negative, it was hard to tell. Disgusted? Disturbed? A more dignified version of freaked out?

"Getting anything?" Yamada asked loudly.

Neji didn't answer, either because of deafness, concentration or hypnotism.

"Guess not."


	35. homicidal glaciers and the not-food line

There was an awkward silence.

Well, there was a bubble of awkward silence amongst the three people sitting at the table in the reasonably full udon restaurant, which had persevered despite being beaten at every turn by Ichiraku Ramen… protected by narrative causality and also every single one of Uzumaki's paychecks. The udon restaurant was more spacious but less populous, and a favourite of Gairanos for obvious reasons. This tiny silence in the low hum of amiable conversation at other tables was broken only by the sound of steady dripping and the sound of chopsticks hitting a bowl repeatedly.

Yamada tentatively reached for the gyoza in one of the centre dishes but recoiled violently when a pale, slightly glowing and damp hand darted out with terrifying speed to grab it before he could, his own massive hand clutching the two wooden implements to his chest with uncharacteristic trepidation.

'Sorry,' Raiku said after swallowing. 'Did you want that?'

Yamada shook his head.

She glanced quickly at Neji.

He slowly did the same.

She immediately resumed eating with what could only be described as admirable efficiency. The two empty udon bowls stacked up by her current, rapidly diminishing one were testament to her sudden, terrible hunger. Neji's eyes slowly slid over to meet Yamada's wide gaze. This brought them to the level of Yamada's shoulder, but Neji would refuse at knifepoint to look up at someone he didn't legally have to. Yamada shook his head again.

In a rare moment of perceptiveness, Raiku peered up through her bedraggled hair. '…What?' she asked defensively, hands tightening slightly on both her bowl and chopsticks.

"Really… going at it there," Yamada said after a horrified pause.

She flushed instantaneously. 'It makes me hungry!'

'You have a habit of stating the obvious,' Neji replied, but he couldn't really summon his trademark acidity. He was still taken aback at the sheer quantity and speed of the meal. He'd barely touched his, she noticed. In fact, she continued to notice with a growing sense of horror making her stomach curl up, she appeared to have stolen all his side dishes, without realising what she had done. From the look on his stupidly perfect face, however, he had.

"…What the hell!?" Yamada exploded, giving up the goat and putting down his chopsticks entirely in the face of Raiku's sheer determination to eat his food. In a ballsy move she could not have consciously made, she had been steadily steering his plate towards the centre of the table each time she nicked something else of his. Neji had put up the best fight, mostly by stabbing her repeatedly in the back of the hand with his own, strangely pointy chopsticks.

Raiku glanced at her own.

Hers were definitely not that pointy.

She squinted slightly, eating by autopilot in a daze. Were they just a different type of chopstick? Did he bring his own- no, he hadn't, because she distinctly remembered him splitting them apart without leaving one lopsided and splintery, which she had never managed to do. Had he  _sharpened_  them? Had he  _gone to a restaurant and sharpened his eating utensils?!_

And for that matter, they were the most conspicuous people in the place and no one was even staring at them! What the hell?! Neji was sitting there, with his… his girlishly long hair and his statuesque… handsome-ness, and Yamada was… Yamada, and- seriously!?  _No one_.

She realised someone was talking to her. "Don't eat that- you can't eat that, Speedy!"

She looked down at her hand in surprise. It was holding onto a dish with a white-knuckled grip, Yamada hanging on to the other end and trying to pry it away without breaking every bone in her ungainly, twig-like body. She gave it a half-hearted tug and a soulful look. Surely she could. What was really the line between food and not-food and how could concrete could it-

She let it go before she could finish the thought. Yamada put it down beside his own pilfered meal and rested his hands in front of him.

With a dawning horror, she realised there was going to be Exposition.

With greater horror, she realised that she'd eaten everything she could possibly eat at the table.

With a sense of gut-clenching dismay to top it all off, she noticed Neji was smirking and  _eating his goddamn noodles_.

One day, she thought hysterically, still opening and closing her chopsticks on empty air. One day she would kill him.

And when had they dried off? Raiku frowned above the mask she'd pulled up, which had been half-frozen with rain. Much like the rest of her. She was still dripping slightly onto the floor, even-

Oh god no.

She lurched back and felt at her torso and arms desperately, checking for sparks or glowing patterns of water and how could she have been so stupid she was in public oh god she was going to be disowned and then murdered and then worst of all her father was going to frown at her and-

"Speedy, sit the hell down and shut the hell up!" Yamada barked.

She froze. There was an abrupt cessation of a high-pitched keening sound. So that had been her. How embarrassing. But she was completely used to being embarrassed, now, so she took it in stride.

Raiku slid back onto her seat, fingers twitching.

"You're fine. You're just freaking everyone out, get me?"

She nodded slowly.

Yamada fixed her with an intense stare, which kept her body effectively paralysed in place while her mind considered her options. Okay. No Gairano stuff, that was off-limits. She was allowed a certain amount of Exposition per year, as long as that amount didn't exceed her cumulative months of Brooding added to her quota Deliberately Being Emotionally Unavailable that she hadn't quite filled up yet because she really liked playing cards, which left her with…  _oh god she was so bad at math_.

Oblivious to her internal struggles (or, more likely, assuming that they were happening constantly and so he could ignore them), Yamada took a dainty sip of his tea. "Right then."

She jerked. 'Yes!'

His gaze didn't waver "Haven't asked you anything yet."

She sagged.

"Anyway." He put the cup down. "What the hell is with the food."

She hesitated.

He raised an eyebrow.

'That… that didn't sound… like a question,' she faltered, visibly swaying back and forth. 'Should… I… I'm going to just assume that was a question that you enunciated wrong- _differently_. Not wrong!'

Yamada bore this patiently for a few seconds. Neji seemed faintly entertained. In his usual way. At someone else's expense, she muttered in her mind, too scared of his potential telepathy to really nonverbally put it out there. After checking to make sure that it really had been internal, she made to answer Yamada's question. 'I get really hungry. Because I've used lots of energy. So I… eat.'

Two unimpressed stares.

"Simple enough," Yamada conceded after a grudging silence. "Stop vibrating."

Raiku shrugged helplessly. The only way she knew how to shrug, but also because she couldn't, with all the spare energy running haywire through her system. 'Sorry.'

"What did you get, Cranky?" Yamada addressed Neji. He had finally broken with the s-nicknames, mostly because it limited his derogatory options, and that was just unacceptable to him. Neji considered this question, or possibly just sat there and stewed in futile rage, or, or, brooded handsomely or-

Raiku rubbed her own (presumably less attractive) face in despair and the friction made little sparking sounds that she did her best to ignore. Neji was the  _worst_.

'It was impossible to see anything,' he said eventually.

Yamada's fist thudded onto the woefully underprepared table. Raiku felt the vibrations through her bare feet and also  _all of her bones_. "What kind of answer is that!?"

Neji's eyes narrowed. 'An accurate one. It was impossible to make out chakra lines, or even veins.'

Raiku paled and fizzled subconsciously. 'What!? You can see my veins!?'

She covered herself protectively with her arms when Neji's eyes slowly slid over to look at her, head still facing Yamada.

He looked back at her teacher. 'Ordinarily, chakra would be visible through any substance. But,' he said with a distinct air of dislike. 'Your student's…  _condition_ … is extremely intense. It was impossible to make out even the most obvious chakra nodes.'

Yamada briefly mulled over this thought for a split second before Neji interrupted it. 'Because she was electrocuting everything.'

'This is getting slightly antagonistic,' Raiku commented. They ignored her.

'With the lightning that she carries around in a clear defiance of public safety.'

She frowned. 'That's a little uncharitable.'

'That she keeps a secret for absolutely no discernible reason other than her compulsively secretive nature.'

'Okay, okay, that was a bit personal!' Raiku interrupted.

"Oh.  _Yeah_ ," Yamada supported her, albeit a little too late and also just too little in general. He cleared his throat and regained his stern expression.

Suddenly, Neji found himself also at the receiving end of Yamada's heavy gaze."How the hell did you even know about this, anyway?" the much, much larger man asked in a low voice.

Raiku watched, wishing she had popcorn. Or at least some form of food, she was still  _really_ hungry.

'Your student assaulted me on my own property,' Neji replied at last. Raiku spat out her tea.

'No!' she protested, yanking her mask back up and pointing at Neji's disgusted face. 'That isn't what happened! I just…! He was…!'

She winced.

'Okay, so that would be one way of phrasing the truth, but it… it is not keeping with the… the spirit of what happened!'

Yamada glowered. Magnificently.

It all came out in a terrible rush. 'He saw me and it was raining and he shoved me outside! So I assaulted him.'

'In my home,' Neji added, dropping her napkin on some of the tea she'd gotten everywhere.

'In his … home,' she finished lamely. 'Okay. So, yes, I… did assault him on his own property, legally and…'

'Literally,' Neji finished for her. When she glowered at him, he met her gaze with an expression of serenity that made her electrified skin itch.

"Good job there," Yamada growled at her. She gaped in outrage, but he didn't let her speak, one gesture from his hand shutting her up immediately. "I don't even care. Hyuuga hasn't said anything, because if he did, I would break his spine and floss with it! So good job there, Cranky," he said with frightening cheer, patting Neji on the back.

Raiku winced sympathetically, both at the mental image and the memory of Yamada's back-patting. He'd be bruised for days.

"So this was mostly useless, but pretty funny."

Neji took this assessment with deadly calm that made Raiku feel an intense sense of fear, like most things that Raiku encountered on a daily basis.

Yamada finished his tea and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. His eyes seemed to be looking through Raiku, who still twitched and sparked occasionally, though the sensation had long stopped being transcendent and now just felt like a little too much adrenaline and tasted like copper.

"So the question now is where you want to go with this, get me?" he asked, watching her carefully for her reaction.

Their bubble of silence rose up again.

Raiku looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. She watched the flashes of light through her veins and under her fingernails for a moment and thought about being able to control it, thought about knowing her own face and knowing what it meant to touch someone without watching herself rip them apart from the inside; she thought about so many things before she spoke. 'I want…'

She failed when the Plot on her left hip let out a snatch of sound. Mostly it was thunder when it tried to make noises now, dispersed with snatches of voices she couldn't quite understand, but it was enough to remind her of its presence. She swallowed and steeled herself. This wasn't really about her. She could do a lot of things. She could learn to use this power, she could steal and hijack a Plot of her own, become a Main Character, have her own, shining life. But she knew what the cost of that would be- she knew that being the centre of attention was never good, because it cost too much. So many deaths and personal Drama catalysts that people just became vessels for messages and morals. They became Characters instead of people, and that was…

That was…

'I don't…'

"Yeah?" Yamada prompted.

'I … don't want to talk about this in front of Hyuuga,' she finished, avoiding Neji's gaze.

'You're damn right you don't!'

Raiku screamed and recoiled from Daisukenojo's hand, slammed into the table inches from her abdomen and slammed right through the bubble of silence and her own introspection.

'Well, well, well! You three have been running around and doing things all … secretively, and we caught you!' Daisukenojo gloated.

'You are such an  _idiot_ ,' Ryuu hissed from his own bubble, made out of the nightmares of other people. 'We were going to watch them until they actually  _said_  something!'

'Shut up, asshat, I'm being a winner!'

"What the hell is wrong with you!? This was private training, get me!?" Yamada boomed, standing up from the table. This left everyone above Raiku's immediately eye level except Neji, who was giving her some weird sort of glare she'd never seen before, which was rare, since he was glaring at her constantly when he deigned to notice she existed.

'What?' she mouthed, when the argument above them started getting really into full swing.

'Her knee was broken! She can't be doing things!'

"She can do what I say she can, short-stack!"

He looked away. With the byakugan, however, he could glare at her from literally any angle and also from across town.

She paled at the thought.

'And another thing! You've totally been playing favourites with this "secret training"!'

"Oh yeah!? And what are you gonna do about it!?"

'It's time to take you down, old man!'

Raiku covered her head with her arms, only for one of them to be grabbed and pulled up. 'Hey!'

Ryuu shot her a bored look and leaned out of the war of Daisukenojo charging Yamada with a battle cry. 'You should leave. He's just going to tire himself out and then want to go home.'

She stared at him. 'Are… are you helping me?'

His glare returned with a force that actually stung slightly. 'No. I'm helping myself. He'll just get his second wind if he gets a chance to yell at you.'

Yamada threw Daisukenojo through a table with an enormous crunch of splintering wood.

Ryuu rolled his yellow eyes and then fixed them back on her, like the world's most sociopathic cat. 'Hopefully he'll be dead before then, but he already ruined my original plan to follow you, so he'll ruin this dream of mine too.'

Staring at him, she mused on how this day had started out so seriously, and then gone insane. Unfortunately, the world then spun when Ryuu took advantage of her disorientation and shoved her towards the door. She narrowly avoided colliding with it in time to sort of awkwardly crawl around it when it opened to admit another person as she tried to open it, spilling out onto the street.

The abrupt drop in noise made her aware of how much background sound she'd been tuning out in there. The abrupt rise in ambient dampness made her remember how it was still raining and she had no way of getting home without Yamada there to give her a chakra net.

'Why don't you buy an umbrella?'

'Because they're made of metal,' she whined, dropping her head. 'And metal makes me really, really happy so I explode sort of continuously.'

'Suit yourself.'

Neji moved past her and out into the rain, walking down the street like some sort of … love interest in a terrible drama, the rain pouring down on him and his long, dark hair and his… stiff back.

'Hey!' she called after him. 'Are you mad at me?'

He kept walking through the water covering the ground, ignoring her.

'Oh god, he's mad at me.'

Raiku hovered in agonising indecision between the overhang and the door, before making a rapid leap to the shelter of the next overhang to follow him. 'Hey! Don't be mad at me! I didn't invite yoooh god I made that worse just now,' she broke off to mumble to herself when she saw his eyes narrow even further. 'Why are you mad!?' she tried. 'I didn't mean to make you mad!'

She was forced to make another leap but wasn't quite fast enough, some water getting through her hair and down the back of her shirt with an ominously crackling sound and sensation. Luckily, the restaurant overhangs were only populated sparsely due to the weather, only really keeping dry the people who'd come outside to smoke. 'I didn't even call you a girl!' she called after him, stranded at the last overhang. She made another keening sound of discomfort before her last ditch attempt. 'I'm… I'm sorry!'

Neji stopped.

She felt a flash of relief, then sudden trepidation at the set of his shoulders.

He turned.

She edged backwards and gave a nervous laugh.

'I took time from my training to do a favour for your teacher,' Neji said evenly, beginning to advance. 'Training that's important to me.'

Apparently whatever character development arc he'd gone through in the Chuunin exams hadn't quite taken yet.

The Plot tried to tug her backwards, for once, which made her stubbornly hold her ground. She cursed her years of anti-Plot conditioning when that meant she hadn't run away.

He didn't seethe, not like Ryuu did, where the person became just a cauldron of boiling rage. He got icy with anger. Like some sort of homicidal glacier that was on a severe incline, dragging him inexorably closer.

'But not for you.'

He stopped when he'd gotten precisely close enough to not get shocked, even when she was so hyper-charged. 'Don't be self-centred enough to think this is about you.'

She stared at him, not quite understanding what was happening. 'I didn't-'

'Not everything is about you, and whatever you are. Gairano,' he told her curtly, before he turned on his heel.

'I… didn't,' she said again, even though he wasn't there anymore, and just stared after her. 'I didn't mean to upset you,' she managed, brow creasing with uncertainty and a strange feeling in her gut.

She didn't really register how long she'd been standing there until someone caught up to her, clearly out of breath. 'Raiku!' one of her less squinty cousins panted, holding out a transparent plastic umbrella. 'I saw you out here and brought you this!'

She glanced down at it. 'Oh… thanks,' she forced out, creasing her eyes in an approximation of her usual expression. 'I really need that.'

Her cousin (second cousin? maybe?) grinned. 'No problem. See you at home?'

She nodded, feeling much more genuinely cheerful. 'See you there!'

Her cousin nodded and jogged back down the aisle of restaurants, back towards the udon place. Raiku unfolded the umbrella and stepped out onto the wet street, mind much more settled. So Neji thought she was a  _what_  and not a _who_.

She spun the umbrella absently, sending water spinning off it in a way she found amusing, rather than the more standard 'horrible' she found most liquids, and smiled to herself.

She could still go home.


	36. purely hypothetical cannibalism

Raiku's father had been understandably surprised, given their recent emotional distance, when she got home and immediately honed in on him for one of their rare and careful hugs.

'What is this…?' he'd asked, staring down at the damp limpet wrapped around his torso.

'Sometimes I really just appreciate you,' Raiku answered, creasing her eyes up at him with great affection.

He had taken this in for a moment, eyes narrowed and brain working furiously, trying to fit the umbrella and her sudden warmth together, and come up short.

He'd cleared his throat. 'Well.' He may have been panicking slightly, since he had never anticipated having to have a deep and meaningful with his very own lightbulb and was woefully underprepared for this kind of pressure. '… Good talk, son.' He'd given her a brisk, manly pat on the back and then fled, probably to read some of their available literature on parenting.

Raiku counted it a success, right up until she woke the next morning.

She entered the waking world like she did every day- by jerking bolt upright and crying 'Aha!' to her empty room. One day, she knew it would pay off, because Ryuu would have come to murder her in her sleep and she would look like she'd seen it coming, staving off her execution for at least as long as it took him to figure it out.

This morning ritual done, she sprang out of bed, feeling immeasurably cheered by the grey light coming in through her window, the sound of the pouring rain steadily coming down on their well-insulated roof and the faint smell of wet earth, which she breathed in happily.

This.

This was the problem.

This was the reason why the hours of six am to ten am were banned in the compound, just shoved into one large time period called Morning.

'Good morning, dad!' Raiku chirped as she padded into the kitchen, humming slightly both under her breath and electrically, creating a tiny and unsettling harmony with herself.

He hummed back from behind his newspaper, which he had used to shield himself from her enthusiasm every morning since she'd exploded into the world, with the exception of special occasions and days when he had to yell at or be proud of her.

Raiku was a Morning Person.

That wasn't capitalised because it was of any use to the Genematrix- it wasn't even capitalised because it was Plot relevant. It was capitalised to every Gairano because it universally disgusted them, as each of them felt the world had brought morning upon them out of spite every day since they'd rolled into it. And maybe it was because, to Raiku, recharging her batteries meant her batteries actually achieved charge, but she loved mornings. They were what happened before the rest of her day, which was almost always horrifying.

But…

She frowned and peered at her father's newspaper from around the kitchen cupboard, other hand fishing blindly for a box of cereal.

His morning hum had been slightly higher pitch than usual.

'Dad…?' she asked cautiously, retrieving the box and starting to eat cereal by the handful, each crunch soothing her suddenly piqued nerves.

He made a questioning hum that sounded sort of strangled.

She absently swung the leg she'd injured in the Sand invasion, gleefully able to do so without pain after so many weeks of intensive healing. 'Is… there something you wanted to talk to me about?'

His hands tightened on the newspaper.

The occasional crunch of cereal was the only sound in the kitchen for several long moments until he carefully folded the newspaper and set it on the table.

Raiku stared at him.

He folded his hands on top of his newspaper.

'Raiku,' he began, looking every inch as uncomfortable as she felt. 'After yesterday, I got to thinking.'

He winced.

'I think we should talk.'

Raiku's face suddenly looked hunted. 'What, why?'

'About… how things are going with you.'

He cleared his throat.

'Emotionally.'

Raiku's expression melted into one of horror. Her fingers went through the cardboard of the cereal box on a horrified spasm. He raised his own hand to stop whatever she could have said. 'I know. I know. I don't like this any more than you do, but it's something we have to do for your emotional wellbeing.'

She carefully set the box down, remembering how she'd gotten out of a similar situation recently. He glared. 'Raiku,' he said warningly, clearly also vividly remembering how this had gone the first night she'd gotten back from hospital.

She edged back, newly healed legs tensing for running. He slowly rose from his chair, hands braced on the table.

'I…' she began in very slow tones. 'Have… to go…'

'Yes…?'

'Literally anywhere else!' she cried, smacking the cereal box off the counter and directly at him, lunging for the door so fast the boards burnt and warped under her feet.

'Not again! IT'S RAINING!' she heard a yell from behind when she hesitated over whether she needed shoes or not.  _No! There was no time for shoes!_

She slammed through the door, not built for that kind of impact and too slow to open and felt fingers graze over the shirt on her back briefly before her father was probably slowed down by the wood flying everywhere. The rain immediately starting reacting upon impact with her skin, but the rush of cold and wet did nothing to slow her suddenly luminous escape.

'Raiku! Get back here!'

She vaulted over one of her aunts with a babbled apology, using her poor relatives to slow her father down. 'Why do we keep doing this!?'

' _Get back here so we can talk about your feelings!_ '

'I'd rather die!' she shrieked back defiantly, feet stinging on the wet gravel she'd launched herself onto to get down the incline to the compound, equal parts skidding and jumping her way down. She managed a more graceful dismount this time, since she had no broken ribs to demand that she roll over and die with a supporting motion from her knee, landing on both feet and only staggering a little bit in the puddle that accepted the violent charge from her wet feet greedily and lit up.

'"Feelings",' she echoed to herself with amusement, sticking her hands into her pockets and setting off at a bouncing jog, feeling rather smug about how that had gone down and also incredibly energised in the effective conductor of the rainwater.

There was a noise like earth moving audible over the sound of the rain.

'Raiku!'

Adrenaline flooded her system again. She turned to see her father jumping out onto the slope as well, significantly more gracefully than she had.

Right. He was a Jounin and _not physically bound to their property_ , she remembered, before realising that he was getting very close very quickly and taking off again with a violent flare of electricity. The outer houses of Konoha flashed by in a blur- she'd found that her perception sped up to match her increased movement the more she used her ability, but it was still dangerous because the rain was hitting her eyes really hard and obscuring her vision and  _STREETLIGHT_

She skidded around it at the last minute in a violent spray of water, still feeling her father's presence. Getting further behind, but still present.

There was only one thing to do.

It was unacceptable. It was wrong. It was the most distasteful thing she could possibly think of and the only thing that might work. But could she do it? Could she really go against her morals  _yes of course she could she refused to have a deep and meaningful with her dad after last time._

Raiku changed course, and headed at a blinding speed towards the forbidden part of town. Literally blinding, since she was moving through the air as a white-blue electric beacon, but fortunately, the neighbourhood closest to the Gairano compound had long gotten used to what they had been told were familial lightning techniques, ever since the unexpected sun shower on Raiku's sixth birthday had made hiding her condition altogether… impossible.

All she had to do was get there before her dad tricked her into falling over or she slipped in a puddle.

 

 

 

 

 

After a hard night and morning of training, there was only one thing to do. Uzumaki Naruto stretched his arms over his head with a sigh of satisfaction, feeling the sore muscles in his arms and back ache in a well-earned way, the rest of him still moving on autopilot towards Ichiraku Ramen.

'I can't believe we're doing this again,' Sakura sighed from next to him, looking dirtier but much more composed under her green umbrella. She'd refused to share it with him, but he knew she'd come around eventually. 'Couldn't we go somewhere else?'

She caught him smiling at her goofily and glared suspiciously, so he just widened his smile even further. 'But they've got the best food, Sakura! You know they do!'

She sighed. 'I don't even really  _like_  ramen,' she grumbled discontentedly, but he knew that was a cruel lie that she was only saying because she was really tired, so he didn't pay it any mind.

As they got closer to Ichiraku, Sakura seemed to perk up a bit. 'Hey. Hey, do you think that's Gairano?' she asked, drawing closer to nudge him in the ribs. This brought her umbrella close enough to protect half of his already drenched head, so Naruto counted it as a win. He squinted, bringing his hand up to shelter his eyes from the rain.

'…No, looks like a crazy homeless guy,' he denied.

Whoever it was certainly did. They were wrapped in what looked like a group of towels, almost entirely obscured from view and getting really weird looks from the other people there, which- Naruto perked up as well- meant there were all these free seats around them! Score!

Sakura frowned further. 'No…' she drew out. 'I think it is. Look at the hair.'

Yeah, there was some white hair escaping from the top towel, sticking out in all directions.

'It could be an  _old_  crazy homeless guy.'

Sakura conceded that point. 'True.'

But as they got closer, it became evident that it was actually her. The towels only allowed a sliver of her face to be seen, but that was all anyone ever saw anyway, so it was still distinctly the skinny Gairano. She seemed to sense their approach, turning and waving one be-towelled arm at them when they were about ten metres away, her bright eyes visibly creasing even from that distance. 'Hey!'

'Don't you dare screw this up again,' Sakura hissed to Naruto, before raising her own voice to greet her back. 'Hi, Raiku!'

'Yo!' Naruto added, breaking into a light jog. He'd never really gotten why Sakura had suddenly developed an interest in Raiku- she was weird, yeah, but so were all the other genin. Maybe it was because Ino and Sakura were only sort of friends and Hinata was really shy? There were other girl genin, but Raiku had been the only one who didn't seem to be in love with… the bastard. No, wait, Hinata wasn't either maybe? Raiku wasn't threatening. Maybe that was it. Not the bastard thing.

Naruto stopped thinking about Sasuke deliberately. Nope! He was here for ramen. The lanky girl's answering wave seemed to twitch slightly, but her eyes were still creased into her usual smile when he reached her.

'He-ey… Uzu…Uzumaki!'

So her voice was weird and she couldn't talk to people. She was still one of their fellow Genin, and she'd been really nice last time! Naruto grinned at her. 'Felt like some ramen?'

'That's a trick question,' Sakura filled in before Raiku could answer, folding her umbrella up neatly. 'He thinks everyone does. All the time.'

She knew him so well.

A muffled, slightly odd-sounding laugh came from under the towel on the taller girl's face. 'Absolutely.'

'What's with all the towels? You look like a hobo- ow!' Naruto yelped when Sakura cut him off with a smack to the ear.

Raiku just laughed again, a little less strained. 'Yes! Yes, I… did. Feel like ramen. That is what I felt like and is the only reason I came here.'

Naruto shook his head, sliding onto the stool next to her. She only recoiled a little bit, so that was also a win. He was on fire today! 'Us too!' He rubbed his hands together. 'Let's eat! You gonna hang out with us?'

'Yes. I am. Mmhmm.'

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku could feel her father's smouldering resentment from where he was hiding on the other side of town, but screw him, she had won this!

That was why her terror and overpowering urge to run away from Naruto was tinged with smugness. He hadn't stopped talking since he'd sat down, but he seemed to be talking to both her and the owner of Ichiraku, so she didn't feel so bad for mainly listening to what Sakura was saying instead. The Plot on her shoulder had slunk down to say hi to the black colossus that followed Naruto around. She tried not to look at his- the more she looked at it, the more she would realise that it was only slightly visible, the rest of it shifting over the landscape as far as the eye could see, undetectable until you looked for it. She twitched at even the thought, which Naruto didn't seem to find unusual.

Much to her surprise, she was…

She shook her head and discreetly ate some more, yanking her towel back up just in time for Sakura to miss it.

She was…

Naruto burst out laughing at nothing she could really identify, hitting the counter for emphasis.

She was actually kind of having fun.

'Idiot! We can barely hear ourselves think!' Sakura scolded from Raiku's right. 'We're trying to have a conversation!'

Naruto shook his head with a snicker but did lower the volume a little, leaving Sakura to re-engage. 'So, why are you wearing so many towels?'

'I have a deathly fear of contracting pneumonia,' Raiku answered promptly. That was a lie. She'd never been sick even once. But it sounded crazy enough to be true.

Sakura narrowed her vividly green eyes. 'So you just… brought them with you?'

Raiku laughed. 'Oh, oh no. That would be silly. No, I stole these,' she added in a mutter. 'But! Enough about my perfectly reasonable precautions, how are you?'

Sakura smiled back a little lopsidedly. 'We've been doing okay with… everything.'

Raiku was master at reading Plot subtext, and Sakura's silence spoke volumes. So much about how Sasuke's defection had hurt them, had damaged their team and the two of them personally. But she was also very socially awkward, so she went for the safe route.

She tragically stumbled on the first and only hurdle. 'I knew you guys would be. You're such a good team. Duo. Oh god, I'm terrible.' She hid her face in her hands. Fortunately, she heard Sakura laugh at her expense, and peered out through her fingers. The pink-haired girl was smiling at her.

'Thanks. Your team seems pretty close-'

'Ha!'

It had come out before she could stop it, so Raiku gracefully covered the accidental outburst by turning bright red and letting every thought she had come out in a rush. 'My team is totally insane, Ryuu even tried to  _murder_  Daisukenojo and Daisukenojo would do the same in a heartbeat. Plus, I'm pretty sure that if we were on a deserted island, they would eat me first, given opportunity. Even,' she added, fixing Sakura with an intense look. 'If we had supplies.'

Sakura laughed into her ramen, apparently not taking her seriously. 'No,' Raiku persisted. 'I'm serious. They would be all "hey, guy, I think that Raiku is a liability and also looks funny. We should kill and eat her". And then the other would go "sounds like a plan, we should save those supplies for when we really need them". That would be it; that would be me over with.'

'Oh, come on. I'm sure they'd eat the supplies first.'

'Ha! You agreed that they would eat me!' Raiku crowed. 'You have validated my position!'

'What are you guys even talking about!?' Naruto interrupted, leaning over so far he almost fell onto Raiku's lap. 'Who's eating someone?'

'Naruto, you idiot, get back on your seat!'

'I'm not doing anything!'

'Naruto!'

Raiku smiled a little awkwardly to herself, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth to stave off a panic attack at his proximity, but still surprisingly less traumatised by the situation than she thought she would be. She even had the opportunity to eat some of her ramen while they were bickering, which was surprisingly delicious.

Though, that may just have been the thrill of the forbidden. She wasn't going to dwell on it.

Technically, she told herself firmly, this was allowed. Her own little Plot was inevitably going to tie into Naruto's, so until it was over, she was allowed to be here. Nay, encouraged!

Not encouraged, she admitted to her ramen silently where it sat and judged her. But definitely allowed. And he was really nice! Sure, this had coincided with her running away from her father, but that was also really handy.

Feeling better about the whole situation, she was so absorbed in her thought patterns and not letting Naruto's flailing gesticulations pull down any of her towels that she almost instinctively crushed the Plot when it gave her right leg a sudden, vicious yank.  _She had to go_.

'I have to go,' she said, not really fully understanding why. 'I've gotta go meet my teammates.'

She frowned at herself slightly. No she didn't. Did she?

'Oh. Well, we should do this again sometime,' Sakura said, giving her a slightly hesitant smile and nudging her a little. 'It was good seeing you.'

Naruto put in his two cents as well. 'Yeah! You can treat me, next time!'

She nodded and shot them an eye-creasing smile, sliding off her stool and grabbing someone else's umbrella when she noticed there was a plastic one up for grabs. Sure, it wasn't her property, but as long as she got away clean, no one had to know that.

Raiku unfolded it and set off, turning a few feet away to wave at the two of them again, before setting off in a random direction. Her feet, wrapped in makeshift coverings torn out of stolen towels, took her through the downtown district in what she recognised as the most winding possible path to Ryuu's house. She caught glimpses of her Plot sliding on the ground under the water, leading her somewhere, but tried her best not to think about its sudden burst of activity. She was lucky that the streets were full of people going as fast as they could so they could stay out of the rain, since she was attracting a few weird stares.

One in particular seemed to stay on her when she stopped and waited for a group of young men to transport several large crates across the road in front of her. It made a sense that had everything to do with being a shinobi in training and for once, nothing to do with being a Gairano, twigged in the back of her mind.

Nonchalantly, she looked around, making it seem like she was just a little impatient with the progress the movers were making. She could only see wrapped up people hurrying around with umbrellas from where she stood- turning all the way around to face the stare she could feel would be too obvious. She took an absent step forward and collided with one of the young men, who immediately yelled in indignation and dropped a few smaller boxes, giving her the opportunity to hastily apologise and awkwardly stoop to help him pick them up.

Glancing around when she'd made the chance to turn showed her… no one.

Maybe she was getting paranoid? The feeling of being watched had abated slightly, so maybe she was mistaking guilt for surveillance.

Raiku frowned to herself and apologised again, side-stepping around to keep going towards Ryuu's. It was only a few streets away, now, but she was starting to feel twitchy… and not just because she was wet enough to conduct constantly. She actually found that invigorating. She felt herself speeding up slightly to try and outrun what she knew was nothing behind her, telling herself sternly that there was nothing to be worried about and that even if there was, she could just make them explode.

Oh god. Her heart started racing. What if Neji had gotten so mad he'd told his family? No.  _No._  Neji hated his family and he'd agreed to keep it a secret. He wouldn't go back on that. She knew that. Intellectually.

No, more likely it was her dad, or the morning had just been stressful thus far. She frowned again, watching the Plot slide along in front. No, it wouldn't pull her towards or away from her father- it couldn't even  _see_  him.

She forced herself to look up again. It was nothing. She was being really stupid because she was having a reaction to being around Naruto, and all her Gairano senses were going haywire.

Even having said that, she felt a lot better when she splashed across the street and saw Ryuu's house down the way. Ryuu may have been aggressive and possibly an actual sadist, but he was very good at dispelling fears. Mostly by replacing them with himself, but he was very easy to focus on, so it worked out really well.

As she got closer, the feeling of being watched returned. That would just be Ryuu, though, watching to make sure she didn't talk to his mother. It was something he was weirdly and violently against, for some reason. The last time she'd tried to exchange pleasantries with the exceptionally friendly woman, he had actually tackled her to the floor and then dragged her twitching body outside, where he had rolled her along the street to the training ground.

She winced at the memory.

There had been stairs in the way.

But a few houses away, she started slowing down, grip tightening on her little plastic umbrella. There was someone standing across the road and a house down from Ryuu's place, just… standing there. In the rain. Looking up, at what she was pretty sure was Ryuu's window on the side of his house, Raiku having climbed through it about a thousand times to harass him. It was pretty early on in Ryuu's life for people to be staring wistfully through the rain at his window, regardless of how pretty people were saying he was, but it did seem that his was the one they were watching.

She couldn't tell if it was a man or woman from the silhouette, they were so heavily covered in fabric, but they looked towards her and then started walking in the opposite direction as she approached, rounding a corner before she even got close enough to pass through Ryuu's front gate.

Something squirmed around in her gut that felt suspiciously like concern. Not fear, because she knew what that felt like, but…

The Plot had stopped pulling her, which meant she'd done what she was supposed to, and this definitely had been dramatic timing. She definitely didn't like that. It was one thing for the damn thing to ruin her life, but her teammates had their own, and she had no right to interfere with that, or to endanger anyone else. But she couldn't really stop it, could she? Plots were never about just one person, and Ryuu and Daisukenojo were the people she was the most heavily involved with outside her family.

Insides wracked with turmoil, she scaled the side of the house and let herself in through his window.

Ryuu didn't even glance at her, towelling his dark grey hair dry with tanned hands. 'Toaster.'

'Hey,' she greeted, deeply relieved that she hadn't come in while he was getting dressed.

When he pulled the towel down around his neck, she observed that his half-dry hair was messy in a way that only made his sharp features appear even more distinct and good looking. That was a bad sign. No one looked attractive after towel-drying their hair, it made normal people looked flushed and bedraggled. Maybe his Drama Ranking had been higher than she thought?

He looked at her for a moment with those strange yellow eyes before he spoke. 'You look terrible.'

She winced. 'Yeah... I know.'

He seemed to feel that was his daily quota for small-talk achieved, and resumed drying his hair for a moment. 'Did you see someone watching the house, before you came in?' he asked eventually, settling into his desk chair and tossing her a spare pair of shoes from the drawer he'd started keeping with spare emergency clothing for her.

Raiku caught them automatically and sat on the end of his bed to put them on, pulling off towels in the process. 'I thought I might have, but they were already walking away before I could tell.'

Halfway through pulling her left sandal on, she looked back up reluctantly. '... Why?'

Ryuu, for once, didn't meet her gaze for very long. '… I just felt something was off. It was probably nothing.'

Raiku didn't know how, but she knew instinctively that he was lying to her. She could really say anything, though- she lied all the time. Maybe it was something personal, or maybe it was something about his family that was none of her business. So she shrugged it off, trying deliberately not to remember how she had thought, for a second, through the rain and even over that kind of distance, how that person's eyes had been a funny colour- a brown that was almost yellow.

'So,' she asked brightly, instead of dwelling on it. 'When I am going to meet your mother?'


	37. cultural moths and smug butterflies

When their team finally met again, Daisukenojo and Yamada having finally settled their differences, Raiku noticed that Yamada was in a much better mood than usual. A quick glance over at Daisukenojo made it pretty clear why: he was scowling and also had what looked like gravel rash all down the side of his face and neck, disappearing down his shirt. She hadn't noticed it at first because of his angry covering of freckles camouflaging it, but it bore the clear mark of Yamada's special blend of training and vengeance. When he caught her looking at it he glared fiercely, but the combination of the freckles and the fact he was still slightly shorter than her just made it endearing, rather than threatening. From the way the glare worsened when she tried and failed to hide her grin, he knew exactly what he was thinking.

"Alright, ladies!" Yamada boomed, arms folded across his gargantuan chest, feet set apart and the entirety of him looking ready to carry all of them and Konoha itself around if he had to. The sun shone down on him cheerfully, like it was egging him on, the unhelpful little shit. "We've been specially requested for a B-rank, get me?!"

'Requested?' Ryuu echoed, folding his own arms across his much leaner body with an air of suspicion. 'We're genin- who in their right mind would request us?'

Yamada's scarred lips creased into a smirk. Raiku grimaced slightly in automatic response. Yamada's happiness was never a good thing for them. He still sometimes walked Cerberus past their house, whistling, knowing that the sight of that dog even a year on made them shudder.

"It's an old friend, from last time! Apparently she thought your piss-poor performance was hilarious enough to warrant an encore, get me?!"

Raiku cottoned on before the other two, hanging her head with a groan. Last time, Yamada had teamed up with her to make fun of Raiku with an unholy glee that she remembered vividly.

"Ichitaka! We're taking her back to Sand, easy-peasy. Again. A little bit repetitive, but this time she's in a group."

'Is that why it's B, when last time it was C-rank?' Ryuu pressed. Yamada didn't smile when he answered this time, which made all three of them straighten slightly in response.

"No. It's because of hostile activity between here and there. We'll need to be careful, but I think you're all ready for this." He was still speaking seriously, his flinty eyes scanning over each of them in turn, checking for anxiety or, in Raiku's case, unusually frequent twitching. Ryuu's lean body was relaxed as ever, and he realised that the little bastard was now a centimetre or two taller than Speedy, who had historically been the tallest. He double-checked Shorty, but thankfully, he hadn't shot up while Yamada hadn't been paying attention. Quite a bit bulkier than the other two, though, probably because Yamada's physical training regimen was based heavily on revenge and they argued the most.

"This could all go wrong. But you're gonna trust in each other, and trust in my judgement, and I say you can do it. You almost made Chuunin, and Chuunin could do this with their eyes closed."

Raiku took a long, slow breath in, closing her eyes for a moment to feel the light breeze rifling through her hair, the early morning sun on her face and shoulders, calming her instinctive urge to run away screaming, giving it some serious thought. She did want to be a shinobi, she told herself firmly. She did want to be one, and her father had said that the Plot she'd been given meant she couldn't be one afterwards... So all she could really do was to keep doing what she was doing, and doing the best she could. She didn't know how long this would take to play out, so she didn't know if she could waste time being afraid.

'No problem,' she said firmly, surprising everyone there. This would be fine. This could be exactly what she needed! Time to get out of the village for a bit. Get some perspective. Time to untangle herself from her family long enough to really think about her situation and get back to being Raiku, the Raiku who wasn't angsty, who was emotionally stable and who could keep grinning and bearing it.

Steeled with this new resolve, she even refrained from fleeing from the intense scrutiny of the three people around her. The training field they were in was only just recovering from her last little adventure, some part of the long, largely green grass still blackened or just gone entirely.

'... What the hell,' Daisukenojo said after a moment, turning from looking at her to look back at Yamada. 'If she's not freaking out, how scary can it be?'

She felt Ryuu's steady, narrow gaze rest on her for a moment longer before he, too, looked at their teacher. 'Let's do it.'

Yamada appeared to suffer a moment of emotion perilously close to pride, the deep scars around his lips creasing a little as he struggled to hold it in, nodding. "We're meeting them at the main gate, picking up our travel supplies at the same time. Everyone good for your general stock?"

When this question was met with general affirmation, he jerked his head towards the path out of the training grounds, the bridge they would take to leave. "Let's head out then."

They fell into place easily in a group behind his lead, Daisukenojo slinging an arm around Raiku's shoulders, to her great surprise. 'So, that was weird,' he said without delay. She shrugged and creased her eyes at him cheerfully.

'Well, we did do pretty well as a team in the exams, and during the invasion. I think we can do it!'

He shook his head to himself. 'You're pretty confident, for once.'

'That means we're all gonna die,' Ryuu sighed theatrically, casting his eyes heavenward and stepping up onto the bridge at the same time, a manoeuvre that Raiku would have fallen on her face during, since she had trouble looking up and walking when she also had to monitor a social interaction of any kind. She swatted at him daringly, which he bore without complaint, to her great surprise, yet again. She shrugged Daisukenojo's arm off her shoulders so she had room enough to put her hands in her pockets, feeling uncharacteristically at ease. Maybe it was the fact it was early in the morning, or maybe it was the fact she loved bridges over busy rivers and the sound of rushing water that had been conquered by man, the stupid smug liquid finally taking a hit to technology, but she felt good about this.

She trod particularly hard on the last bit of the bridge, feeling her usual surge of smugness at the river's expense, which her teammates were used to enough that they didn't comment on.

'... You think she'll recognise us?'

'Why do you constantly feel the need to become infatuated with women who are way out of your tiny league?' Ryuu sighed. Daisukenojo flushed with outrage.

'It's not like that, it's just been ages!'

A pause.

'Wait, what do you mean, "tiny"?! You asshole!'

Raiku took a nimble skip ahead to draw level with Yamada, rather than getting caught in the perfect storm that was Ryuu's snide comments and Daisukenojo's inferiority complex.

"Hey there, Speedy."

'Yo.'

Yamada fixed her with a horrible glower that she was completely unprepared for. "Don't you start saying that. You look enough like the goddamn copy-nin already, there's no need to starting talking like him, get me?'

'Got it, got it,' she replied quickly. After a few minutes of walking in a surprisingly comfortable silence, she finally mustered up the courage to ask what she'd wanted to since the mysterious person she'd seen a few days earlier, using her teammates' argument to make sure Ryuu didn't hear them. 'Yamada...'

She hesitated, but she had his full attention now, so the only way forward was through. 'Do you think that Ryuu... Has been acting a little weird?'

Yamada eyed her side-on. "... In what way?" This could be bad. The last thing that he wanted was an internal conflict on a mission they hadn't even grazed the level of before.

She shifted a little uneasily. 'I just.. I don't know, he just... I think he's worried about something. And I think someone was watching his house, on Tuesday.'

This made Yamada fall into a long silence. "How sure are you?" he asked at last.

She shook her head helplessly, so he put a hand on her shoulder, marvelling at how narrow it was. She really was a skinny little thing. "Leave it with me, Speedy. I'll look into it."

Fears addressed, Raiku felt herself relax again, a weight she hadn't been entirely aware of lifting from her shoulders. Or maybe that was just Yamada's hand moving, letting her spine fully straighten again.

"And cut your damn hair. You look like an ancient porcupine." Raiku yelped and clasped the sides of her head, using her black-clad spidery fingers to tamp down her spikes protectively. Yamada snickered and sauntered ahead with his hands in his pockets, whistling to himself.

Raiku was still silently resenting him from behind when they approached the gate, Ryuu and Daisukenojo mercifully postponing their argument from the moment they came into the visual range of the party they'd be leaving with. Ichitaka was as perfectly beautiful as Raiku remembered, her white-blonde hair and sultry, dark-rimmed eyes unforgettable even after the year they'd had. She was dressed as a shinobi, in serviceable, flexible but reasonably tight clothing, pulling off the browns and mesh in a way that made Raiku envious in some well-smothered, feminine part of her brain. Raiku took the opportunity afforded her and the others by Yamada and Ichitaka exchanging pleasantries and some preliminary information, sinking back to stand with her team and observe the group they'd be travelling with.

Ichitaka was obviously the leader, her forehead protector around her slender neck matching those arranged on the three younger people she was with- obviously either genin or newly-made Chuunin. They were glaring at Team Yamada; the alliance with Sand was very, very new, and there was still a lot of tension between the two villages. Their alliance had been made, after all, after a devastating loss on Sand's part after Orochimaru's apparent betrayal, or so Raiku had heard, so things were... Tense. To say the least.

'We're basically ambassadors,' Ryuu muttered into her ear on her left. 'There are a lot of goodwill missions going on, to try and dispel tension.'

'The short one looks like a real asshole,' Daisukenojo contributed less helpfully on her right, with a total lack of self-awareness that made her smile under the safety of her mask. The three other genin were either their age or a little older, with her money on older, and the three of them were male. The two taller ones appeared to be twins, light-skinned and eerily identical in both face and dress, with short, dark-brown hair and hazel eyes. They could have been attractive, Raiku supposed, though people with lean, runner's builds like Ryuu tended to remind her of, well, Ryuu, which ruined the effect somewhat. They were sending them equally assessing looks, if not the vile glare of the shortest member. He would have been roughly Raiku's height, so she wasn't sure where Daisukenojo got off calling him short. His skin was a lot darker and patterned with vertically symmetrical yellow lines, even stretching up to his face and lining his dark, dark eyes. His hair practically matched the decoration in a distinctive blond, and ... Yes, yes, he was now giving Raiku a once-over. She cringed a little, but tried to keep standing up straight. She withstood Ryuu, she could withstand this short bastard.

She reflected on what the other team were probably seeing as they scanned them in return; Daisukenojo, whose hair was so red it was offensive, the rest of him just one reasonably muscular freckle from his hairline down to the ground, not that that was very far. His clothes were simple and mostly light colours, he didn't seem to have any special weapons. Probably not very intimidating, she thought guiltily. Next, Raiku, who was too tall for a girl her age (if they could even tell she was a girl) and topped with a fitting shock of pure white hair, the rest of her narrow form covered entirely in close-fitting dark blue and black, her only visible skin around her electric blue eyes. Not very scary either, but ideally, they would take her protective measures as signs of intensity or secrecy, and think that she was stronger than she was.

Then, Ryuu, the only one of them who really looked like a shinobi, with his handsome face just on the side of too sharp, slightly predatory right down to his facial structure and the rest of him just as lean, his tanned skin and cat-like eyes. His effortlessly pushed back grey hair. Raiku had managed to cut it or ruin it almost every month, but it never really took. It unsettled her, deep inside, and only partially from jealousy.

'They all seem pretty sure Daisukenojo's the weakest,' Ryuu added, when their gazes seemed to hone in on their own shortest member, just as Raiku had guessed. Daisukenojo growled as discreetly as he could manage, but it appeared that their respective leaders seemed to feel their judgemental time had been used up and stood in the middle of the six of them.

"Team Yamada, meet Team Ichitaka." Yamada gestured from them to the others. "From right to left, these are mine: Hatori Daisukenojo, Gairano Raiku, Ryuusuke."

'What's his full name?' Little Guy asked suspiciously, crossing his arms.

"It's just his first name, get over it."

Ichitaka indicated her own group a little more gracefully. 'This is Konishi Iwao,' the littlest one glared at them, 'and Kano Akihiro and Akihito.'

'Well, I bet that gets confusing!' Raiku improvised on an awkward laugh that just trailed off when all four Sand-nin stared at her blankly.

'No. It doesn't.' the leftmost twin said (Akihito? Oh god, she was already getting this so wrong).

'Ichitaka, we were under the impression that you were a civilian,' Ryuu said with as much respect as he could muster without hating himself.

Ichitaka inclined her glorious head. 'When I last visited Konoha, I was visiting as a private citizen, not as a visiting shinobi.'

'You were a spy.'

Dead silence.

Yamada looked torn between pride at Ryuu's obviously powerful skills of deduction and the desire to make him run laps until he vomited.

Ichitaka didn't seem bothered. 'Well done.' She looked at Yamada. 'Shall we go?'

Raiku turned her gaze heavenward to ask the gods for the strength to get through this without losing her mind. On the way down, her gaze caught one of the shinobi in the gate-attached watchtower closest to them, making her do a dismayed double-take.

A jounin with bandages stretching across his nose sent her a needlessly conspicuous wave and a wink that could have been seen from outer space. She gaped for a moment in silent horror, then glared as fiercely as she could. When he utterly failed to be intimidated, she grumbled under her breath and looked determinedly at the ground, deciding to just ignore him until one of them died.

How rapidly her day had gone downhill, she lamented privately.

Yamada gestured. "Ryuu. Grab one of the others and scout ahead. We're setting out."

'Akihiro.'

At Ichitaka's word, the twin on the left detached (damnit, she had been wrong!) and joined Ryuu, whose face bore a totally blank expression, the two quickly vanishing ahead. Yamada looked at Raiku, who jerked to attention right away. "Raiku, you watch our backs."

It was so wrong for Yamada to be using their real names. It spoke of a greater disharmony in the universe. Raiku waited with resignation for her death sentence. Ichitaka was very prompt to provide it, just nodding at Iwao, who walked over to join the masked girl with a sneer.

Great, the small fry. Why couldn't it have been the other twin, for the sake of conceptual symmetry?

They stood and waited for the other four to get far enough ahead, Raiku taking the opportunity to take in the sight of her village behind them, its high walls stretching up amongst the trees, Hokage mountain in the distance, the sun shining down on its cheerfully well-kept buildings in between.

When she felt she had enough material for her Romanticism quota, she decided to make impromptu, friendly conversation. But how to proceed? They'd already greeted each other, and he clearly didn't like her or, if his silence was any indication, particularly want to talk to her. Raiku wracked her brain for an answer desperately, feeling the silence stretch on awkwardly.

A compliment! That would be perfect! That would show both her desire to play nice and that she was paying attention to him!

'I like those markings! You're kind of like a giant moth.'

Oh god. Oh god oh god  _oh god_ -

She heard herself start to panic-talk and could not, for the life of her, make herself stop. It probably would be for the life of her. He was going to kill her, those markings were probably of some deep cultural importance and she'd called them giant bug lines.

Backtrack, backtrack!

'Not that that's a bad thing, I like moths! Butterflies always seemed sort of smug to me but I like moths, they don't spend all their time showing off not that I think you're a show-off or anything I'm sure you're very nice and not smug at all and you're not attracted to bright lights or anything stupid like that-'

She had backtracked from a bomb  _onto a minefield._

Fortunately for both of them, she ran out of breath surprisingly quickly, probably because she'd been breathing shallowly already out of nerves,

Raiku closed her eyes and prayed for mercy when her nervous babbling didn't provoke a break in his stony silence. She also heard a distant laughter from the watchtower above, and silently vowed that she would one day kill that man.

'Thanks.'

Raiku's impossibly bright eyes shot open at the sound of Iwao's voice, as gruff a sound as she thought it would be, but the word itself completely unexpected. He was looking at the ground instead of at her, still glaring a little.

Had he been sarcastic? He hadn't sounded sarcastic. Maybe her sense for it had been dulled by the sheer intensity with which Ryuu usually used it, since he could project sarcasm at a distance of several miles, which he was doing now and almost constantly. She stared at him, ironically bug-eyed, so intently scanning for aggression that she almost missed it when he set off on the wide dirt path out of town.

She squawked. 'Wait for me!' She ended up running to catch up, drawing level with him quickly with her long strides.

Iwao was tense all down his spine and across his shoulders, but she took comfort in the fact he wasn't allowed to kill her. That was something she couldn't say for Ryuu or, in his more heated moods, Daisukenojo, so it made her feel slightly more genuinely cheerful. As a result, when Iwao glanced up in response to her continuous staring, he got a full voltage eye-crease that radiated goodwill.

This made him frown more deeply. Raiku was undeterred, she was going to have a good day and this mission was going to go well! She was going to be cool and collected and she was not going to make little puddles of glass everywhere like last time, because she had already made sure her clothes were water-and-sand-tight! Her momentary doubts were cast aside, they were for the weak!

Iwao's yellow-lined eyes turned back to the path ahead. 'We should split up and work from the trees,' he muttered. When Raiku nodded cheerfully, he snorted lightly through his nose in a slightly contemptuous fashion. 'I hope you brought cooler clothes with you,' he said under his breath after giving her entirely black-clad, spidery form a glance and jumping deftly into the trees.

Raiku's heart and optimism shattered into a million ill-prepared, soon dehydrated pieces.

'Damnit!'


	38. paper, scissors, vengeance

By the time they reached their second day of travel, she had managed to stop wallowing in despair. Not all hope was lost! Luckily for Raiku, they wouldn't reach Sand for a few days at their current speed- that left her with some time to try and think of a solution.

Well, that what was she was telling herself. The thought of having some time between the desert and her failed to cheer her up, as she knew the odds of her finding clothes that were both cool and covered her from head to toe were not in her favour.

She darted from tree branch to tree branch through the dense forestry that lay between them and their desert destination. She was following her team in what amounted to a tiny cloud of fast-moving shinobi swiftly leaping through the upper echelons of branches in perfect silence, the chakra on the soles of her feet holding up. For the time being.

She barely restrained a sigh on her next jump, reminding herself to try to keep her mind on the task at hand. She found travelling at this speed… tiring. More tiring, somehow, that her usual methods of lightning transit, and also far more difficult for her. Her pathetic chakra senses were enough to keep a vague sort of tabs on everyone else in the small group as they flitted from branch to branch, but she preferred being able to see them, to track people with her more basic senses. This silent path they were taking was too different from their last approach, which had been swifter, but also basically had been a training exercise, and made it impossible to forget that they were actually in danger this time.

The ache in the balls of her feet and calves attested to the hard pace that Yamada and Ichitaka had set, but she knew she couldn't complain. Everyone else seemed fine with it, after all. Daisukenojo had looked a bit pale when they had bedded down the previous night after a long day's run, but Ryuu had settled in to fight with him immediately, which had seemed to energise him somehow. Raiku had tried making more amiable conversation with Iwao, but no matter how many words spilled out of her in tidal waves of nervous energy, all she got was one-word responses. She'd accepted defeat in exhaustion and gone to bed with the sinking feeling that this would be the tone of the entire trip. As a result, each time she caught a glimpse of yellow in her peripheral vision, she had put on an extra burst of speed. Infuriatingly, this hadn't seemed to help.

She vaulted over a particularly low branch and in her split-second of superior height, scanned the distant forest floor below for her Plot. It had taken to following her around on the ground, since it had had the apparent realisation that controlling her emotionally wasn't as effective as just steering. She couldn't see it, which unsettled her at the best of times, and was so distracted she almost hurtled into the back of one of the Kano twins.

Raiku managed to catch a low hanging branch and twist at the last second, but she landed so close to the unmoving, crouched young man that she could feel the heat radiating off him, could see each muscle in his neck in detail as he turned his head slightly. She stilled as well, feeling their leaders up ahead, their chakra just as frozen in space.

She strained her ears listening for any sign, stretching her limited senses for whatever had stopped them. For achingly long minutes their group blended into the trees in their stillness as a unit, before Ichitaka released a tiny pulse of chakra to signal the all-clear.

Kano sprung off the branch immediately, so lightly that it didn't shift at all. Raiku followed suit but in another direction… which was the other problem.

This was really boring.

 _God_ this was going to take forever.

She allowed herself to fall into the rhythm of check-jump-check, occasionally looping under or precision-jumping onto a particularly narrow branch for entertainment, eventually becoming lulled by the repetition.

 

 

 

 

 

When they camped for the night, Daisukenojo was put on first watch with Ichitaka right away, leaving Yamada to direct the other five members of the group. Raiku and Ryuu were conscripted for camp set-up so that the three other junior shinobi could set up traps- which both Raiku and Ryuu resented, since they were both excellent trapmakers. Raiku because her upbringing had demanded a mind like a corkscrew, Ryuu because he enjoyed trapping people, and liked to be good at what he enjoyed. It was the same reasoning that made him so good at most shinobi activities and an undefeated player of Monopoly.

The two Team Yamada members protested from where they clambered around on the lower branches of the trees surrounding their campsite, but their complaints fell on unsympathetic ears. Yamada had his reasons, and he maintained they were strategically valid.

"You've both got creepy eyes and I don't like them watching me in the middle of the night!"

Yamada stared them both down from where he was overseeing and timing their construction of a camouflage canopy for them to camp under.

Two bright pairs of eyes glared at him, one far more effectively than the other.

He shook his head firmly. "I'm not budging. One of you will be on watch with me tonight, and the other on will tomorrow night."

Raiku and Ryuu turned to each other, Raiku switching the thin ropes she had been pulling on to one hand, Ryuu tossing a leafy branch on their mostly suspended net and dusting his hands off. Yamada paused the stopwatch obligingly.

Raiku narrowed her eyes. 'Here we go,' she leaned towards him from the tree she had climbed, one foot braced against the side and the other stuck in a fork of branches, arm extended so that he could see her hand. 'Paper, scissors, rock-  _no, Ryuu!_ ' she shrieked, scuttling back up the tree and almost hanging herself with the rope.

'You can't use a knife in "paper, scissors, rock"!' Daisukenojo protested hotly, crouching by his pack.

Ryuu kept his kunai out and maintained his eye contact with the startled Raiku, unblinking, and raised one of his already raised eyebrows even further. Aggressively, somehow. 'I didn't. We were actually playing "paper, scissors, Raiku spent all night kicking me in her sleep so I'll be damned if I take the first night". Common mistake.'

'It wasn't my fault!' Raiku protested.

Ryuu eyeballed her. 'And yet.'

In deference to Ryuu's ability and apparent willingness to stab her in the face, Raiku grudgingly nodded to Yamada to agree to take the night's second watch. He smiled broadly, a picture of happiness. "Glad we got that sorted. When you've finished that, don't forget to set it up for collapse."

Ryuu snorted. 'No, we thought we'd leave it here for the next lot of shinobi to come by and use.'

Yamada grinned. "And once you've done that, you can give me two hundred push ups! Fun night ahead, fun times."

Raiku snickered, but her amusement was short-lived. "That means both of you."

Brief triumph deflated, she set back to work as quickly and securely as she could.

A few more knots in, the others started returning from their own tasks. The twins retreated to opposite sides of the camp to set up their bedrolls, but there was no sign of Iwao until the job was almost finished. Raiku had almost finished setting up the collapse tag when she noticed him standing at the foot of the tree she had climbed up and squawked in surprise, her surprised flail almost taking down the whole thing.

This earned her exactly no change in expression.

'Hey. There,' she said awkwardly, half hanging out of the tree. 'Konishi.'

He blinked up at her slowly, the fire half-illuminating his face and making the yellow lines seem to shift in unsettling patterns. She thought maybe, staring at them, that she was starting to understand what the practical purpose of them was.

'That's not efficient.'

She blinked, and then glanced at her emergency collapse line. 'What? Sure it is.'

When she looked back at him, he had tilted his head back to scan the entire canopy. '…No. It's not.'

'But… it will work?' she offered uncertainly.

He finally looked back at her, face blank. 'Yes.'

'So…' she drew out. 'Why don't… you show me how to do it next time, and we leave this one up?'

A few long moments passed. One of the twins was watching the exchange with something like amusement, which seemed to irritate Ryuu, who didn't like it when people other than their inner circle got to be amused at Raiku's expense. It had been a problem in the past.

Iwao gave a minute shrug. 'Fine.'

Raiku sagged with relief when he turned and walked back towards the fire, settling on one of the logs they'd dragged over to sit on. That guy gave her the heebie-jeebies. Something about that totally blank stare, combined with the way she'd been conditioned to be afraid of short people's violent tempers by Daisukenojo, made her constantly wary of his impending explosion.

'I think he liiikes you,' the aforementioned redhead grinned from a nearby branch. She imitated him in an unflattering falsetto and pulled a face. He laughed, swinging his legs. 'You were right- this trip is gonna be great.'

She rolled her eyes and threw a twig at him. 'Shut up and get back to your post.'

Stupid Daisukenojo. Just because he was in love with four people at once.

Raiku jumped down and landed lightly next to Ryuu, who had commandeered two packs of noodles after he'd finished coating the canopy with the actual camouflage, leaving her to rot like a true friend. His incongruously cheerful little pot was bubbling away next to a larger pot of… something, that the other nin had put on. Raiku wasn't game to ask. When she reached for theirs, Ryuu promptly smacked her hand away with his little metal poker.

'What was that for!?' she exclaimed, cradling her stinging hand to her chest.

'Don't touch the pot,' he grumbled.

Raiku was hurt. 'I can make noodles, Ryuu!'

'Oh please,' he scoffed. 'You've destroyed a toaster, a rice cooker, two saucepans and at least four ovens in the last year  _alone_ , and those are just the ones I know of. But this is  _my_  pot and  _you_  aren't going to ruin it.'

She sat heavily on a large rock next to him, resting her elbows on her thighs. She then grumbled half-heartedly for a few minutes, only a token show of protest because it meant he was making her dinner and she didn't have to ever again, probably. She had to admit that she mostly lived on whatever she or her dad could make very quickly, since she tended to experience sudden, unexpected surges of hunger.

She realised someone was talking to her and glanced up.

One of the twins had his eyebrows raised expectantly. 'Sorry?' she asked, flushing slightly, grateful for the mask that hid it.

'I asked how you managed all that,' he repeated, lifting the lid on his own mysterious pot and stirring it a few times. His voice was higher than she expected; a mid-range tenor that seemed incongruous somehow.

Raiku laughed a little nervously. 'Oh, I… I'm not good with cooking in general. I get distracted easily.' A blatant falsehood; Raiku had a good attention span, but the unfortunate trait of being possessor of an extremely potent electrokinesis that made using metal pots and pans a risky endeavour.

… Also umbrellas, hairpins and coins of any kind.

She winced. As if that weren't bad enough, kunai, senbon and razor wire were already dangerous even without being inevitably magnetised by the powerful electromagnetic field that she generated by using her abilities.

'Akihi…to?' she guessed, adding it slowly to the end of her sentence. Iwao was sitting next to him, the flickering fire making those lovely, awful patterns with the markings on his face and stretching down his neck. From her peripheral, she noticed that he was making eye contact with… Ryuu's pot, but shaking his head very slightly, very slowly.

'Akihiro!' she amended hastily. 'I meant to say Akihiro.'

Iwao stopped moving his head.

The older boy smiled faintly, but she couldn't help but notice that it didn't reach his eyes. 'Correct.'

Raiku laughed a little, but it was a little too high and obviously nervous. She covered it by trying to reach for the pot, only to receive another stinging smack on her wrist.

Hissing in pain, she withdrew. For now.

Another movement in her periphery caught her eye, dragging her attention downwards.

She groaned internally.

The Plot wiggled to say hello.

She'd had almost a whole day without seeing its black, undulating mass! It had been going so well! Her calves, hamstrings and feet were aching, but it was still better than this!

…Also all her core muscles and, inexplicably, her upper arms, but still better!

It oozed cheerfully. She tried to glare at it while not being too conspicuous, but felt Iwao start looking at her again. Stupid Iwao, why couldn't he just murder her and be done with it? It would be a mercy to end this suspense. It jerked what amounted to a head, or at least an upper part, towards the left ( _Raiku noticed something strange at the edge of her chakra senses and half-turned towards it, extending her reach slightly_ ) no, she absolutely did not! She jerked her head up and stubbornly refused to look at it. No, this was not the time! She had to go along with it, but this wasn't Konoha and she wasn't at leisure to go off investigating anything. This was a mission, and any deviation from their mission structure would at best, inconvenience everyone, and at worst, put people in danger and kill them.

Her forehead creased a little under her forehead protector. And she didn't even know how to extend her chakra senses! At least not in a practical way, she understood the theory.  _God_ , why did Character Raiku have to be better at everything? The wretched cow probably had better hair, too.

She realised what she was doing and shook her head violently. This earned her some weird looks, but they were just going to have to get used to this sort of behaviour. Ryuu had; he'd barely blinked. Nope! No. She was not going to envy someone who was somehow, confusingly, both her and not real. She had poor chakra senses and couldn't use jutsu, but by god, neither could Rock Lee, and if he could both be shinobi without being able to do those or have nice hair, so could she.

She smiled. Unfortunately, she found herself creasing her eyes at Iwao, who didn't respond at all. The flames reflected off his dark, dark eyes.

Raiku died a little inside, but that was to be expected.

Ryuu jabbed her in the side with a hand outstretched for her bowl. She handed over the worn plastic container automatically and accepted her food a second later, nudging him a little with the entire side of her body in thanks. 'Stop wiggling, you need to get some sleep before your watch,' he muttered.

She didn't stop fishing her chopsticks out of her bag with her free hand, just rolled her eyes. 'Thanks for the reminder, pal.'

He shrugged. Smugly.

'God, you're terrible,' she mumbled. But she couldn't stop the faint thread of affection from creeping in; it was easier to appreciate her team when she was being intimidated to death by another one. She also felt more warmly towards them literally every time she saw, heard, or heard the name of Hyuuga Neji. Or Naruto, but that was more subliminal conditioning.

'Your team seems close,' Akihito commented from behind them, leaning over and around to put his own little cooking utensils on. Raiku looked at it in silent surprise- she'd thought his brother had been cooking for both of them, but he must have been sharing with Iwao. Luckily, Ryuu answered in his usual way. With derision.

'Familiarity, so on.'

'Breeds contempt?' Akihiro finished, both eyebrows raised.

Ryuu smiled thinly.

'We get along fine,' Raiku interjected between hasty bites. 'He's just a jerk. Take everything he says with a grain of salt.'

'Your group seems… stoic,' Ryuu continued on as if she hadn't spoken. 'And why are you sleeping on the other side of the camp from your team?' he asked Akihito side-on.

Another long silence. Raiku wondered if it was too late to change teams, or to defect. She could go hang out with the other Konoha missing-nin, who were guaranteed by narrative causality to be at least five times more attractive than their more law-abiding counterparts. She couldn't do anything with them, and had never really wanted to with anyone, but she could appreciate the irony? She could take in the view.

The Plot released an angry burst of sound, half thunder, half voices and she jerked slightly, but resolved to ignore it. It wasn't the appropriate time, she had other people to think of and it was just going to have to accept that. There was nothing she could do, so it had to work with her.

'Well, I'm going to get some shut-eye!' she announced brightly into the tense quiet. 'Tell Yamada to wake me for my watch when he gets back, yeah?'

Ryuu shrugged, which she took as confirmation. She took off her shoes and unrolled her sleeping roll with an air of satisfaction, smoothing her hands over the soft wool and thin futon and wishing she could risk taking off her gloves to feel the fabric. Or that she could wear a little less clothing so that she could just roll around on it for a while.

Sure, it was weird, but she had to get her textural fix somehow, it wasn't like she could touch things all the time.

But, she couldn't, so she just sighed a little and cocooned herself in a way that would definitely inhibit her ability to spring into action in case of attack, but that was so deeply satisfying anyway. Ryuu patted her in a perfunctory manner. 'Night.'

'Night,' she yawned back, burrowing further into her makeshift nest. She listened to the fire for a while, eyes closed, and nearby traumatised crickets, before she felt warmth dredging itself upwards and pulling her down to sleep.

The Plot slunk away from the clearing, unseen by the others.


	39. chakra drain and deceptive shyness

There was someone in the camp.

Raiku expected the next time she woke to be to Yamada's frightening grin and his hand on her shoulder. Instead, she woke suddenly, for no real reason that she could discern. It was still pitch-black out, so she hadn't overslept. There was no sound, other than the quiet rustling of leaves and the occasional cricket chirp, so that wasn't it. But for some reason, the silence felt heavy instead of peaceful.

She tilted her head and squinted blearily at the fire, trying to tell by how far it had gone down how much time had passed. She couldn't make it out- the other shinobi was standing at the edge of the camp, but it was too dark to see. The world swum dizzyingly when she attempted to look at the edges of it that were visible from her angle; her vision swimming in and out of focus in a dark fog. She tried to blink the sleep out of her eyes and felt a sharp pain stabbing into the back of her head that made her put a hand up reflexively to cradle the side of her skull, wincing groggily.

She tasted iron, felt her arm moving slowly and only half making it up. She squinted at her fingers and curled them into a fist- or she would have, but they just twitched. She heard a strangely distant crackle, saw light flicker through her glove, but it felt wrong; dreamlike. She couldn't feel it. She couldn't feel it. Just a numbness, bone deep.

Dazed, she struggled to lift her head and only managed a centimetre or so, to try and see where everyone was. She could see the back of Ryuu's head, a vague silhouette made by the dimly glowing embers. Raiku licked her strangely dry lips and drew breath to speak, but the effort burned. Her lungs were aching, air shallowly filling her them and escaping too quickly in faint, high-pitched pants.

Wavering in and out of focus, she could just barely catch glimpses of two other people sleeping on the other side of the camp, which didn't make any sense, because-

There was someone standing in the camp.

A deep fear started crawling up from her stomach into her chest, gripping her heart and making it pound in her ears. Something flickered in her peripheral. She prayed desperately for it to be one of the others, for it to be someone she knew. But she couldn't turn her head; her limbs felt leaden, not responding, leaving her trapped in place. The flicker turned into a silhouette that trod slowly and easily around their belongings and the other shinobi, silently. Deliberate. Measured. Unstoppable. A nightmare coming inexorably towards her and her friend.

It stopped. The dark figure slowly tilted its head. Her frantic heartbeat sped up until it was almost one long, continuous sound. Fear choked her.

They were standing over her teammate.

Considering the sleeping Ryuu, silently. Just standing there and watching him sleep while she couldn't do anything about it and Ryuu was so completely defenceless. Her fear was morphing into an intense panic and helplessness. She couldn't move. She couldn't use her powers, she couldn't do anything and

"Speedy."

Raiku jolted awake with a gasp so sharp it hurt, fingers clutching at the fabric over her throat. Two enormous hands settled heavily on her shoulders and Yamada's face swum into focus in the dim light of the embers. 'Speedy,' he repeated more softly, lacking in emphatic grammar. 'You alright?'

Raiku stared at him for a second in mute, lingering horror, the sounds of the forest filtering gradually in. 'I... There was...' Her eyes were darting over the camp, never settling in one place. 'There was someone,' she managed, throat oddly hoarse even in her whisper to her leader.

Yamada looked at her very seriously, right into her light-emitting eyes. 'Where?'

Raiku shuddered slightly, vestiges of her fear slowly settling back into her mind. 'They were here, I just... I just saw them.' As consciousness crept in, her terror started sidling out, replaced by the comforting reality of Yamada's solid, undeniable presence, the feel of air hitting the cold sweat she'd woken in, the faint sounds surrounding them. It felt real in a way that seemed to make the stranger feel incorporeal and her fear ridiculous.

Yamada didn't laugh. 'The first watch is over. No activity.'

Raiku swallowed. It burned her dry throat. 'Are they sure?' she asked weakly. But it had been dreamlike, she had recognised it even at the time.

'Yeah, Speedy. You're alright,' Yamada said, patting her on the shoulder lightly (for once).

She released a shuddery breath and pulled herself together. It was the mission, she had been worried. It was all so very serious, and they'd been going at such a hard pace that there had been an underlying sense of urgency. That was it. She was letting herself get emotional under the weight of her personal problems and it was affecting her work. She had to get herself together.

She creased her eyes at Yamada. 'I had a nightmare.'

Yamada had been a shinobi for a very long time now. 'Are you sure that's what it was?'

She met his gaze only briefly before she looked back at the ground. 'Daisuke and Ichitaka would have noticed something, so it was nothing.' Daisukenojo would never have let something happen on his watch, no matter what it cost him, and his chakra abilities were by far the best of the three of them. She trusted him. No one could have gotten past him to get to them, he cared too much.

After a moment's scrutiny, Yamada released her shoulders. "Right then," he nodded, regaining his usual tone. "Time for watch."

She nodded in return, rubbing sleep out of her eyes and throwing her blanket off, where it landed on Ryuu where he was sleeping next to her. He grumbled a little in his sleep and she took a second to look at him, reassuring herself. Ryuu didn't look innocent or beautiful in his sleep, which was a relief to her. That would have been a very bad narrative sign. He just looked like himself, with his eyes closed, like people were supposed to. So a little bit scary and a little bit handsome, but mostly slightly irritated. She levered herself into a standing position and luxuriated in a stretch, relishing the feeling of having herself back under her own control. Daisukenojo passed her on his way in, just dropping and rolling directly into her bedroll. She nudged him with her foot indignantly, but he just groaned a little and burrowed in with impressive speed.

Feeling generous, she decided not to electrocute him and to just make him wash it tomorrow. She loved her teammates, but after two days without bathing they started smelling intolerably like teenage boys, which was not at all restful.

Yamada gestured for her to take the north side in the upper branches, and she jumped upwards. Staying up for a few hours would make her feel more grounded, she knew from experience. She settled in the midst of some leafy cover with a good view, shifting her forehead protector down a little to decrease the visibility of her electric gaze.

If she kept her power above its usual baseline, just high enough to keep a reassuring hum in her bones, no one else had to know.

 

 

 

 

 

By the time they were packing up the next morning, she felt much more settled. She even had enough energy to talk Daisukenojo's ear off as they packed up, forcing him to carry her bedroll to repay her for her generosity in lending it to him.

'Generosity my ass,' he grumbled, strapping it to the top of his own things. 'You crammed yourself in there with me the second your watch ended and you are the pointiest human being to have ever lived.'

She creased her eyes at him in a literally radiant smile. 'Then you should have used your own things, Daisuke.'

One of the twins snickered from her left, which she didn't even flinch at. She was that relaxed. It was a novel feeling. She wasn't even twitching. Much. Certainly no more than her physiology demanded after a night spent conducting electricity so constantly and then going into a sudden cut-off. She'd been well-covered enough to keep Daisukenojo safe, but she'd borne down especially hard on herself to make sure there weren't any accidents.

She hadn't wanted to be alone.

She shook off the remnants of her horrifying dream and made a determined fist. In the gently dappled light of day in the rather serene forest, the details of it faded away to nothing, just leaving only vague images, but the feeling of fear at the thought remained the same.

Daisukenojo continued complaining under his breath, but she had already assuaged the worst of his anger by handing over one of the red bean buns that her father had secretly smuggled into her bag to make up for trying to have an emotional moment with her.

She smiled to herself, secretly, not creasing her eyes at all. The eternal builder of bridges: food.

Yamada and Ichitaka conversing quietly on the corner of the camp caught her eye and she looked over at them with a complete lack of subtlety that would have totally mortified a better shinobi.

Her teacher was frowning.

Determined to be more cheerful today, Raiku leaned over to look at what Iwao was doing- something hidden in his hands.

He visibly stiffened when he felt the heat she exuded hovering over his shoulder, dark eyes sliding over while the rest of him froze.

'Whatcha doing?' she asked in a rare fit of bravery.

He gazed at her for a moment before slowly resuming what he'd been doing, pulling his hands apart slightly to make it more visible. She made a sound of interest at the sight of intricately bound up chakra strings, so fine they were almost invisible.

'So I guess you knew what you were talking about with the canopy, huh?' she mused.

Iwao nodded.

She eyed him. Something about Iwao's stilted, uncooperative demeanour was setting off a flag of recognition in her brain, but before she could try to pin it down, their respective leaders walked over to address them.

"Alright, wimps," Yamada said loudly, folding his arms into his trademark stance, feet perfectly hip width apart. "We've gotten a report from a nearby squad about a possible disturbance in our route ahead. So, we have two choices."

He stopped. They waited, but he seemed too deeply displeased by the idea of a democratic decision made amongst genin, too offended at this violent upheaval of the way of the world to continue.

Ichitaka gracefully took over. 'We can either continue with our current path and risk open conflict, or we can go around.'

'How long would that take?' Daisukenojo frowned.

She gave a fluid shrug. 'Anywhere from three to five days longer than our current estimated time.'

A chorus of groans.

'But I don't understand,' Raiku said loudly, trying to be heard over the noise. 'If there are enemies ahead, if they really are shinobi, they won't remain immobile, so don't we run the risk of running into them anyway? If they really are gunning for Konoha- or Sand-nin.'

Yamada grinned in approval. "Correct."

She let out her own groan of exasperation. 'So this is just about luck?'

Ichitaka made a slight sound of disagreement. 'Each side has pros and cons. If we continue ahead, it is possible that we will collide with a force of superior strength if they haven't moved on by the time we pass by. On the other hand, if we go around, we lose any support we have from allies in this territory.'

'Wait, that sounds like a big detour, if it's going to take us out of Konoha patrol range,' Daisukenojo interjected. 'How far, exactly?'

Ichitaka crouched and swiftly drew a few distinct shapes- the Land of Fire, the Land of Sand, the two countries that stood between them in equal parts. She pointed to the low Land of Rivers, making a dot roughly where Raiku vaguely remembered Tanigakure being. 'Of these two countries, River is the only nation that either of our countries has had any interaction with. That is why our route traditionally leads us here, and it is a good enough reason to remain in this country. Our new route would lead us near the patrol border of Tanigakure, the village of the Valleys, whose presence would hopefully deter any pursuit.'

'Tani isn't an ally of ours, or of Konoha,' one of the twins pointed out. 'We have no guarantee that they aren't one of the hostile parties ahead, given the recent political unrest.'

Ichitaka nodded. 'That's true.' Straightening, she dusted off her hands. 'So our choices are to either risk a definitely hostile party, or an unknown quantity.'

The area fell into a pensive silence.

After a while, Daisukenojo spoke up. 'Yamada, what do you think?'

Yamada inclined his head slightly. "I'd go for the direct route. These are the current patrol zones of our two villages," He crouched and drew two long curves some distance away from Konoha and Sand, the two lines coming reasonably close to each other. "They're a lot bigger now, since Sound went mental, so there's less unprotected distance to travel." Then he drew a line directly between the two villages, showing precisely the unprotected distance they would go through, and settled back on his haunches. "Any conflict we run into, if we couldn't handle it, could be dragged into either territory so we could send for help, unless it was smack-bang in the middle of this zone, get me?"

He shook his head. "I would never rely on another village when Konoha's just lost a Hokage. Same with Sand and their leader. It shows weakness that they might take advantage of to capture and interrogate us."

'But conversely, weaker villages like Tani have also historically been eager to gain favour with strong neighbours, and its neighbours are both Sand and Konoha,' Ichitaka pointed out. Clearly they had been arguing enough to try and put it to the team instead of just persuading the other. 'We've been able to expect assistance from them in the past, and even if we hadn't, we would not approach them directly. We would be using their own area of strength, without their knowledge, to make enemy parties reluctant to follow us.'

'So it's a bluff.'

Ichitaka nodded in agreement with Iwao. 'Our choices are whether to strong-arm our way through or bluff.'

Daisukenojo put a hand up. 'I want to go direct. We stand a better chance with our own territories than with a stranger's.'

The twin that had spoken before agreed and put his own up in silence.

The other shook his head. 'I vote indirect. It's too obvious. We have no idea how big the enemy party is, or if they're specifically after anyone here.'

'Or if it's even still there,' the other argued. 'It's unlikely that an enemy force, however small, would remain long in Konoha territory; it's still considered one of the most powerful villages, and their aggression has risen exponentially recently.'

The reasons for why were both obvious and politically incorrect in their current company, so no one dared say anything.

Raiku hesitantly put forward an idea. 'Couldn't we get one of our squads to draw them away, or to scare them off?' She fidgeted when this made her the centre of attention. 'If they're in our territory, or even just outside of it, they should be taken care of by some of our shinobi. Unless they're here for a reason, they wouldn't want to start something right inside our border.'

Yamada beamed proudly. "Good idea! Unfortunately, we don't know if they're inside or just outside enough to make attacking them undiplomatic. So it's moot. But!" he added loudly, clearly making a contentious point. "If the enemy were high-ranking, the ANBU wouldn't have ignored them. They would have smashed them into fine powder. So that means we're looking at Chuunin, maybe a Jounin or two, at the absolute most."

She deflated. It had seemed so doable. 'Then I say go straight. We don't know what Tani's alliances are, so they might side with our enemy. They might even  _be_  our enemy, we have no idea.'

'Tani has no alliances and a positive history with your village,' Ichitaka pointed out, the briefest of displeasure flickering across her lovely face.

Raiku shrugged helplessly. 'That's my vote. I'd rather be able to go for help than to not.'

'If we get attacked in this unprotected zone, any attempt to get help would be too late.'

Ryuu got involved, but seemed strangely without his usual vitriol. 'The enemy force must be both small and mid-level in order to be classified as an acceptable risk by our forces. And yours,' he said blandly, not really looking at anyone. Raiku frowned. It was unlike him to not bore into other people with his gaze. In fact, he'd been unusually withdrawn for a strategic conversation.

Ichitaka opened her mouth to speak.

'Straight.'

Iwao offered no further justification after his interruption. With his word they had reached an unassailable majority, so the vote was done. Yamada seemed pleased by Raiku's uncharacteristically confrontational decision, or maybe just about having won. "Right. Then we need to make sure we're all battle-ready, and we travel in formation, get me? We need to be able to attack as a unit at a second's notice, and the get the hell out of there when we need to. We're about to leave Konoha territory, and it'll take more than a day to get into the outskirts of Sand's turf, travelling as hard as we can."

'The idea is still not to provoke conflict, and to remain undetected if possible,' Ichitaka stressed. 'We don't want to enter a fight with anyone. We remain straight, and if and  _only if_  the group breaks off to pursue us, we immediately flee or fight as a group.'

'Wait. Wait wait wait. Were… we not travelling as fast as we can?' Daisukenojo asked faintly, clearly already regretting his vote.

Yamada's scarred lips stretched into a horrifying smile.

 

 

 

 

 

'I changed my mind,' Daisukenojo panted to Raiku at the other end of the same day, slumped against a tree for their five minute break in the orange light cast by the sun setting over the forest. 'I changed my mind _ten hours ago.'_

The rest of the younger members of their group seemed in total agreement. Raiku's chakra had failed her almost four hours in and she'd just been relying on her ability and her balance to keep her going over the tree branches. They were universally saturated in sweat, dirt and in some cases, a bit of blood from being nicked by branches on their faces and arms. Ryuu was bent over and leaning on a tree, deliberately steadying his breathing with slow, deep breaths that made Raiku's chest ache in sympathy, while Daisukenojo had thrown up the second they'd stopped and she'd had to drag him over to lean on something. He still looked pale and his legs shook intermittently, but he was the worst off. The twins and Iwao looked like a few miles of bad road, each, but while Akihito had collapsed onto the floor and just stayed there, Akihiro had ignored him and slumped over to the river they had stopped right next to, splashing his face and neck with the cool, clear water before starting to drink it for what seemed like forever.

It made Raiku eye him with completely blatant envy that went soul-deep. It looked so cool and refreshing. It looked wonderful. But if she did so the river would turn into heavy water because of the ionisation and the entire place would fill with oh-so-flammable hydrogen gas.

She would be lying if she said that made her stop considering it completely.

How bad could it be? What was a little explosive gas between friends-

No! No, she couldn't. Bad Raiku.

Raiku was bad at science, but this was one field she knew intimately. So she made do with her canteen, which made her mask and shirt cling to her with annoying dampness, but was still better than the alternative.

Yamada was as fresh as a daisy. He was doing  _stretches_.

Raiku's system was jittery and too energised from the sustained build-up, despite her best efforts. She needed to discharge. She needed to explode or explode something. Her fingers were twitching and crackling every time she stopped consciously forcing it down. And she was the best off- she hadn't been using any chakra except for her sensing, she hadn't been using anything except her own strength. It was severely depleted, but also not ruined by chakra depletion.

For its part, the part of her that was the most literal Raiku was totally ecstatic, or at least as ecstatic as localised electricity could be. It had been out  _all day_. It was disconcerting to be nervous, exhausted and totally euphoric at the same time. Also, extremely confusing. She was going to have to do something about it.

Wracking her brain for a solution, she missed her window.

'Five minutes up.'

At Ichitaka's announcement, they all dragged themselves into a more ordered state. Raiku despaired inwardly but leaned forward to help Daisukenojo up. 'A bit of help, Ryuu?' she panted. He ignored her.

This wasn't unusual, but his behaviour from earlier was still bothering her in the back of her mind.

"We're about to head through one of the River Nation bamboo forests, and the weather's picking up," Yamada told them, looking in the direction they were presumably going. Raiku had noticed more bamboo trees as they'd progressed, but she'd dearly hoped that that wasn't going to happen. She could fake it amongst sturdier trees, but springing from the flexible bamboo stalks instead of wide branches of normal trees wouldn't allow that kind of fraud and her chakra control was frayed under the weight of her power buzzing through her veins. She cast Daisukenojo a desperate look to plea for his aid, but he was breathing in carefully through his nose and then out through his mouth, obviously trying not to throw up now that he was standing again.

Raiku felt herself break into a cold sweat and cursed her body for its physiological stupidity. She was barely keeping hydrated as it was! What were they going to do once they reached Sand- get Ryuu to carry her again?

Oh god. Oh god no. Anything but that.

Raiku repressed the urge to throw her head back and stamp her foot in childish, but powerful, frustration.

Yamada was still talking, but his expression was serious. There was no amusement in his gaze. "This is gonna be a prime spot for ambush, especially since it's almost dark. I want everyone on their guard at all times, get me? And if the weather goes bad, which it looks like it's gonna, it's going to mess with us something fierce."

Ryuu spoke up from next to Raiku. 'I might have enough chakra to keep the area around us stable in the wind. But only if we compress our formation.'

Yamada shot him an assessing look. "By how much?"

Ryuu considered it, glancing around at the size of the group. 'Significantly. I'm still a genin, for god's sake, be reasonable.'

Yamada glanced at Ichitaka, who seemed to agree. "Will it slow you down?"

'A little, yes,' Ryuu said irritably. 'I've used a lot of my chakra to keep my legs from snapping off. If someone else gave me a bit of chakra support for running, I could dedicate the rest of my reserve to keeping the weather off us. And it is going bad,' he added spitefully. 'Just so you know.'

'The chakra expenditure will attract the attention of anyone nearby,' Ichitaka murmured to Yamada, who nodded grimly.

"Yeah, but on the other hand, this little bastard wouldn't be picking up on the weather unless it was gonna get windy as hell. I don't know about your mob, but mine don't have any experience in this kind of environment."

Ichitaka considered the six of them with equal grimness. 'We haven't encountered the shinobi we were warned about. If they haven't moved on, this would be the ideal place for them to be, and with something this conspicuous…'

Yamada nodded. "Ichitaka'll run ahead. If she gives the signal, you drop that jutsu right away. Not in a second, I don't care if you can terminate it safely or not, you just drop it and I'll drag you behind if there's a backlash, get me?"

Ryuu nodded, but his narrowed eyes broadcast his displeasure.

Yamada seemed happy with it anyway, if his bloodthirsty grin was any indication. "Alright! Closed formation. I want everyone within proper range of each other at all times."

Yamada started shouting them into place, but Raiku was so used to it that she could think while her body obeyed automatically. Ryuu was acting strangely, and there hadn't been a cloud in the sky when they'd set off. Sure, the sun was setting and they had travelled a significant distance, but Ryuu was barely ever able to predict the weather. The last time had been because he'd been making the weather, and that just a tornado. That she vividly remembered being part of, so she quickly glossed over that part mentally. She tried to remember what she knew of this geography. This bamboo forest was stretched across the foot of one of the mountains that stood over one of the many valleys that made Tanigakure's name so appropriate, but she didn't remember much else. The terrain would be bad enough with the bamboo, but if the weather was really going to turn nasty enough for them to risk detection to avoid it, the mountainous area they were entering could rapidly turn ugly.

She didn't like this. Yamada didn't like this. Daisukenojo gave up and threw up into a nearby bush, so she assumed he didn't like it either. Yamada set about supplying Ryuu with the additional strength he needed, giving Raiku a chance to check with someone else. She chose Iwao, because at least he had never openly called her stupid.

'Do you feel like something's up?' she hissed.

Iwao glanced at her. '…Yes.'

_Damnit._

'I think this is a bad idea. Do we say something?'

'No. We can't go around at this point. We just have to be ready.'

He looked at the ground when he was done and a jolt of that recognition from earlier hit Raiku low with a realisation. It temporarily eclipsed her anxiety. '…Hey, Konishi,' she said slowly. 'You're actually just… really shy, aren't you?'

His head jerked up and his face went slightly red, visible even under his dark tan.

She gaped, feeling a sudden surge of giddy relief. 'Oh my god,' she exhaled. 'I thought you wanted to kill me! This is such a  _no Raiku focus_ ,' she told herself sternly, hitting her forehead with her palm to jolt herself back on topic. 'I think-'

"Move out," Yamada instructed from behind. Ichitaka vanished in a blur of speed, the rest of them launching into the trees automatically. Raiku's legs burned fiercely all the way along, particularly in each knee and during each relaunch. As they fanned out a little she could still see Iwao and Ryuu, slightly behind, but none of the others.

Energy surged through her bones and kept her speed up, but made demands that she couldn't meet. She wanted to run. She wanted to burn and fly and she couldn't, she reminded herself sharply, that was just the exhaustion and adrenaline talking. Yamada had cut it fine- the first of the towering bamboo started to appear within less than an hour, when the sun was almost completely down and the world that twilight blue-grey, even through the trees. She avoided them for as long as she could until the more generous trees ceased to appear completely, and she had little choice.

Raiku dragged as much chakra to her feet as possible, but she could feel it steadily leaking out around her damaged control and escaping her- she was undergoing an unacceptable level of drain. Each jump had to take her diagonally across and forward to jump at a sideways angle from the last bamboo tree to land with one or both feet on another narrow stalk and they were so closely placed together that this required pinpoint aim and made it impossible to see clearly more than three metres away at the most. The effort and concentration this was taking was straining her already exhausted mind. She couldn't keep this up.

To make matters worse, the wind had started. The stalks were swaying in the air with increasing intensity the longer they kept through, and the constantly shifting and changing environment added to Raiku's already powerful paranoia to set her teeth on edge and her eyes alight with stray energy. She sped up subconsciously, feeling the edges of her panic from the night before seeping back in with her doubts under the cloud-darkening sky.

She felt a flare of a familiar chakra behind and to her right and the wind around them died abruptly. Along with the sound of the forest moving around them, or any sound at all. It was surreal- the air around them was still and perfectly silent and the forest in their immediate proximity motionless, while outside their protective bubble, the rest of the bamboo whipping through the air violently and crashing into each other made it impossible to see anything more than glimpses of other parts of the forest. It should have been a cacophony, but their bubble of stillness made it that much more unsettling.

The next time she caught a glimpse of Ryuu in the dark, she turned to get a better look at him in a pause perched against one of the stalks, but couldn't make him out.

Her skin was starting to crawl, and not just because her chakra was starting to slip her control more violently. That sense of wrongness was building.

In the absence of a warning flare from Ichitaka, Raiku steeled herself and kept going. She had to trust her team. She had to trust her team-

There was a powerful flare of chakra from up ahead.

Enemy movement.

Their group immediately drew in close enough to make each other out but kept hurtling forward, each other face set in grim determination. Raiku did her own quick headcount to reassure herself and looked ahead again. She took a tiny comfort in Yamada's presence behind them, solid and unmovable.

Seconds later, she felt more than saw Ryuu stumble slightly; the wind hit them with hurricane force and they were blasted with the sudden cacophony of bamboo wailing and crashing against each other under the elemental force of the growing storm and a suddenly whipped bamboo stalk caught a twin mid-jump and sent him flying backwards under the force. Iwao swiftly changed direction and went back for him while the other kept going as though nothing had happened. The sound cut off again viciously as Ryuu performed his technique again, but the air still moved slightly and when she saw him, his face was white and covered in sweat under the strain.

'Ryuu!' she shouted to be heard. 'What's happening!?'

Ryuu's teeth were gritted so tightly she couldn't fully make him out, but whatever he said made Yamada close distance to hear the full story. "What did you just say!?"

'It's not… natural!'

This time, Ryuu's pained exclamation could be heard by the group as a whole.

Raiku's blood ran cold.

'It's someone… else!' he forced out, struggling to keep going and straining under the force of maintaining his own jutsu. Its sphere of effectiveness had shrunk down to barely encapsulate their now tightly organised group and faltered after mere moments, the rest of them now forced to contend with the fury of the environment. Yamada was forced to grip Ryuu and support him, half-dragging him along. He was almost doubled over and in obvious pain, forced to seek the ground; she could feel his chakra faltering and failing. "Ready for attack!" Yamada bellowed, forcing Daisukenojo to take Ryuu's arm and a Kano, the other. A flash of movement made Raiku's head whip over to her unguarded left and she felt terror crash over her like an enormous wave when she felt its familiarity.

A vice seemed to close around her throat.  _Not a dream. Not a dream. Not a nightmare_ \- 'Incoming!' she shrieked, voice almost lost in the sound of electricity surging upwards and out to her skin, lighting her up as a beacon in the dark and splintering the bamboo she'd jumped off. 'On the right!' one of the twins yelled back.

Yamada vanished in a split-second and she heard an enormous crash even through the wind and the surrounding wall of sound, but she couldn't pursue. She couldn't leave her teammates behind. She reacted at the flash of a kunai flying towards them and intercepted it with her own, ricocheting off to send them both elsewhere. She drew another in readiness and felt the metal humming with electric charge, vibrating in her hand and growing hotter and hotter.

A strong gust of wind made her squint and her eyes water, but she managed to keep them open enough that she ducked the incoming kunai slash of a shinobi who appeared right in front of her to attack. She flared violently from surprise and fear, forcing the enemy-nin to step back and illuminating him briefly. As well as the unfamiliar Plot that was wrapped around him like a snake. She snarled in helpless rage and parried another blow, her red-hot kunai sizzling upon impact and her free hand coming around with the momentum to blast a wave of electricity in a wide arc. He vanished before it could make contact, leaving her looking around in fearful confusion.

'Raiku, above!'

She immediately looked upwards at Daisukenojo's panicked yell and only narrowly blocked the kick of the enemy, but the power behind it made her stumble and lose her balance. Her arm throbbed with pain but the enemy gave her no time to recover and pressed the advantage with another low kick the second he landed, impacting hard on the side of her knee and making it buckle, sending her into a lopsided kneel on the ground. She managed to bring her armed hand up in time to make him withdraw the punch he'd been sending her way and lunged to her feet to slash broadly across his chest with blinding electric speed. She only manage to leave a shallow slice across his sternum before he gripped her hand and shoved, but he'd been forced to let go with a hiss from the pain of the brief electrical shock, and as they both gained a split second of distance she realised he was already recalculating his strategy.

She panicked. She couldn't let him think of another way. She'd lose. She was faster than him and he couldn't touch her, but he was obviously stronger than her and she needed this to be over right away. There were more- she could hear the fighting in snatches that weren't stolen away by the wind and the sound of bamboo whipping against each other.

Wait.

She abandoned defence and launched herself at him in a burst of impossible speed that he partially dodged but that clipped him on the side and sent him into one of the trees. Before he could recover she sent a line of wire out to try and trap him but it went wide in the wind and went too low, only getting him around the hip. He freed himself instantly and went back on the offensive, hands forming seals together rapidly.

'Wind seal!' came the warning from behind. Raiku cursed and let power pour out of her in a blinding flash that seared the eyelids of her teammates and disrupted the man enough for her to throw her kunai directly at him.

He vanished again, the kunai burning directly through the stalk of bamboo and sending the entire thing crashing down.

'Not good,' she panted, trying to keep her eyes open against the wind. 'Not good.'

She had to be able to see him and touch him to kill him. Her distance capabilities were weak, but if she could grab him, she could kill him. If he reached Daisukenojo and Ryuu, they were dead.

Pain exploded along her left side and she crashed to the ground, rolling at the last second to get out of the way of a stomp that split the earth she'd just vacated, wheezing with the force. She felt warmth running down her ribs and reached, yanking out one of the shuriken with a cry before she rolled onto it and imbedded it further. She was forced to roll again and curled up to defend against a violent kick, putting a hand on the ground so she could launch a kick towards the other man's leg that connected with a satisfying crack and the feel of something giving. She heard a curse and he retaliated with a swift move that made the air around her shove her to the ground again flat, an enormous pressure keeping her down and her lungs too limited to draw enough breath. Her eyes rolled in her head to try and see her teammates and if she could have, she would have cried out.

A Plot of his own was attached to Ryuu at his feet, its mass sliding up his legs and enmeshing him- an exact double of the shinobi she was fighting. Had been fighting.

She realised distantly that she had lost.

The air stilled. There was silence, except for Raiku's shallow inhalations and those of the nin above her, keeping his hands locked together to keep her down and out.

'Ne, that was a strong jutsu.'

The voice was a smooth, androgynous one with an accent she couldn't place. She couldn't see the owner- they were too far to the side, and her own foe hadn't spoken.

'It took a lot of effort to force our way through. Impressive, since you seemed to have felt your way through by intuition.'

She heard a single, muffled clap.

'Let her go!' Daisukenojo demanded.

'I wasn't talking to you.'

Daisukenojo let out a sharp sound and then she heard a thud that she recognised; her teammate falling to his knees. Ryuu swayed in her peripheral vision but managed to stay on his feet, even if he had staggered.

'What do you want?' he rasped.

Whoever he was talking to paused for a moment before they spoke again.

'I want you to come home.'

Another pause.

'We thought you dead with all the others. Imagine our surprise when a young man is seen in the chuunin exams with our eyes and techniques, so long gone.'

Ryuu's face seemed to change from where she lay. He said nothing, though.

_Where was Yamada?_

'And then we'll be done here.' The person continued. The pressure on her chest increased, forcing more air out and Raiku let out a strangled noise. Her vision was going dark around the edges. The warmth down her side was pooling under her and she knew it was blood, leaking out from her injury. 'And I would rather not harm anyone else. They seem to have been kind to you, and that's important to us.'

_Where was anyone?_

Desperately, Raiku reached for her ability where it lay beneath her skin, but the oxygen deprivation was making her lightheaded and her limbs non-responsive.

 _Just like before_.

Wind trumps lightning. Ryuu had always beaten her.

She managed to move her head enough to look at Ryuu and the unconscious Daisukenojo, vision starting to fail. He was pale and shaking slightly, his yellow eyes wide. At last, at last, she saw the person who was speaking to him, who had watched Ryuu in his home and in his sleep and who watched him now with their own steady, yellow gaze. Heavily covered in camouflage greens and browns, hidden almost entirely, but whose eyes were unmistakable.

Ryuu opened his mouth, an expression of contempt twisting his sharp features. 'Go… to hell,' he panted.

The man tilted his head in a move so familiar it made Raiku's skin crawl. 'Ryuunosuke. You know you don't belong with these people. You've told yourself a thousand times that you have a family now, and it doesn't matter where you came from.' He tsked and shook his head, maintaining unblinking eye contact. 'But you know that's not true. You know you aren't meant to languish in obscurity in some village on a downward spiral to nowhere.'

Ryuu bared his teeth and the man smiled slightly without showing his own. 'We came to get you.'

Raiku forced out another pained sound before the man who was keeping her down growled in warning, attracting Ryuu's attention and catching his eyes with her own wide, frightened ones. He looked away quickly, back to the man and opened his mouth to speak. Raiku watched in mute horror as the Plot reached his throat and tightened, something shifting in Ryuu's gaze.

_No. No no no nononono-_

'You attacked us. You  _stalked_  me-'

The man took a step forward, his sharp, beautiful face twisted with strong emotion. 'You are our  _family_  and they  _stole_  you from us!' The man's passion intensified and she could hear it in his voice, his accent growing stronger.

Ryuu jerked back as though stung and the man took another step. 'You are ours,' he said fervently. 'You feel the world the way we do and they wander through with their eyes closed and their hands over their ears.'

Ryuu looked down. At Raiku, meeting her gaze and she saw his fear for her fade in his eyes, saw the Plot taking hold of him and he was going to leave her there to die, she realised. He was going to leave her and Daisukenojo to be murdered in the dark because his own personal narrative demanded its resolution and it had started so much earlier than she could ever have expected. She had been so afraid that he was being targeted by her own Plot that it hadn't occurred to her that he had been the original Genematrix risk.

She opened her mouth to try and form words but she had no air left to speak. Her arms and legs were numb, motionless.

A black shape appeared like the hand of god itself, sliding across the ground to her. Her own Plot, returning now. She strove to remain conscious as a ray of hope pierced her like an arrow, watching it with greedy eyes. She had to live to have one. She had to live. She refused to die. She felt an unknown strength welling up inside her chest, felt it climbing her spine and pounding in her ribs- in the back of her eyes as they started to close against her will.

Power built until it ripped out of her skin, out through her fingertips, her eyes, her mouth in an electric explosion of terror and euphoria and desperation and sent the world white, before it went black.


	40. ashes and heavy water

Reality was not gentle.

Raiku drew in a breath sharp as a knife through her ribs, eyes flying open to stare blindly at the black and orange sky. Her long fingers pressed and grasped at the ground, at nothing, trying to find purchase and she could feel coarse dirt sliding under her fingernails. Each desperate inhale burned and tasted like copper, like smoke and ash and it burned her throat all the way down.

Coming back to herself by degrees, her unfocused eyes started to perceive small grey flakes lit up with strange yellow light, drifting gently down, mostly blocked out by a sudden dark shape above her.

'-ku!'

Her ears rung painfully and made her sense of balance impossible to regain. Lying still, she still felt she was listing to one side. There was a deep and constant rumbling that made the earth tremor under the sensitive pads of her fingers and a higher, closer sound she could barely make out.

'-sh..-n't…-ea… me-'

Distantly, she started to become aware of herself, of her limbs, the feeling of the earth under her scratching at her skin. She jolted, but not under her own power and the world came into painful clarity like an avalanche of sensation crushing her under its weight.

Noise.

'Raiku!'

'We don't have time for this; she's bringing the place down!' Ryuu shoved Daisukenojo out of the way to where she couldn't see him and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her roughly. 'Raiku!' he snapped, face blackened with ash. 'We've gotta go!'

Taste.

She tried to swallow and choked- too dry, too much ash, blood. Smoke. The coughing forced her to jerk upright and the motion made her head spin, nausea rise in her stomach with sudden violence.

Sight.

When she drew her hand away from her face, shaking, her pale skin was totally bare, but for the blackness under her nails, across her palms. Her clothes, when she could focus on them and for what she could make out through the darkness, were totally grey with ash that shifted each time she shook violently. They were left in burnt tatters spread unevenly. Her mind was fuzzy and it felt like wading through fog, but-

Pain.

One of her arms was dragged up around her teammate's shoulders, Daisukenojo taking the other.

Ryuu-

Ryuu!

She tried to jerk away from him towards her other teammate and almost threw up at the agony that shot down her left side from the injury she had forgotten. She heard a distant cursing when her mind threatened to leave her again, felt him try and tug her back. 'Not you,' she croaked, eyes rolling in her head. 'Not you, not you-,'

'What the hell is she talking about?' Daisukenojo demanded.

Ryuu's face was sickly pale under the grey, but he studiously avoided both of their gazes. 'She's delirious; just help me get her up!'

She realised they were shouting- the roar and rumbling she had felt so distantly were real and deafening, something she had blocked out.

Fire.

The haze in the air wasn't her mind. It was smoke, filling the bamboo forest, now set ablaze with a heat so intense it was searing her down to her bones, an impossible heat. The area around where they had been, for almost a kilometre- the earth was completely blackened and burnt, not even stumps remaining of the bamboo forest they'd fought in until the wall of advancing flame. It was the bare earth that had kept them safe, the fire having nowhere else to travel, but they were trapped. If they didn't escape, they would die of smoke inhalation, or smothered to death by the heat.

They.

They.

She felt her lips crack open and start to bleed when she tried to speak, but all that came out was a rasp. 'The man-,'

'He vanished!' Ryuu snapped immediately, cutting her off. 'Can you walk?!'

She nodded but her first attempt to get her legs under her left her crashing back onto her knees and forearms, wracked with weakness, unable to see through the dark spots swimming through her vision.

She was so hungry.

She felt hollowed out, weak; there was nothing for her to support herself except for the other two as she tried to stand twice more and failed, before eventually managing to keep her balance on legs as shaky as a newborn foal.

She kept losing snippets of time, getting jerked back into reality forcefully.

'Our window's closing-,'

'Where the hell is Yamada!?'

'He's gone for the others, but nothing from Ichitaka-,'

'This way!' A third voice. She didn't recognised it, hadn't even known her own. She took a few staggering steps and heard Daisukenojo cry out for some reason, a reason she didn't understand until her bare foot made contact with something other than earth. He couldn't reach her before she looked down and her mind started spinning from something other than disorientation, flooding itself with profound horror.

Her father, warning her when she was so young:

_How much electricity does it take vaporise a human body, Raiku?_

She realised that she was speaking, whispering something over and over again, too dehydrated to cry but still, 'no no no no no,' over and over and over and over and-

_That's why you have to be careful._

A charred skeleton, the pale of her foot disappearing into thick ash that would have been flesh and a melted band around the neck from the man she had fought before, what had she done to him-

_Careful._

She was pulled back, blindly, by hands covered in fabric to protect themselves. Each step jarred the wound in her side, forgotten in the wake of what she'd done. Was it still bleeding? She couldn't tell, so smothered with the heat from the fire they were approaching.

She found herself in sudden freefall for a moment, released abruptly on each arm before an impact struck with the colossal boom of thunder overhead.

For a split-second her mind ascended pain with a rush of joy and a terrible strength, the nauseating guilt and horror and  _shame_ but then she-

'Gairano!'

-fell back into herself, into her flesh and bones that hurt so badly, heard her heartbeat thudding in her ears, knocks on a door she kept closing.

Hands seized her arms and kept pulling her forward, voices in a blur. Raiku let her head fall back helplessly and saw white flickering and lightning brewing in the clouds above them, still lit by below by the fire and shifting like the interior landscape of hell. '…s'not raining,' she managed in a slur, sure there was something wrong with this scenario, sure that dry lightning didn't happen this way, even as it greedily followed her from above.

'Of course it's not raining, it's you! You're doing it!' Ryuu snapped. She tried a few times and finally got her head to turn towards him and he was hiding so well that he was frightened, that he was so bone-deep afraid of her and himself and she knew because she knew that fear so well, saw his guilt. The Plot was gone, probably obliterated or carried off with the man who was his family, and Ryuu was himself but not knowing why he had been the person he had been for a moment; who he would probably be again when it came back for him. A person who would have left them both for dead, so much like Sasuke, whom he had loathed and disdained for so long.

'Ryuu,' she said hoarsely, forcing him to glance back at her from where he had been focusing on the path ahead, made clear by someone she couldn't make out, their movements frantic blurs in the corner of her eye. In the moment he made eye contact she swallowed, hard, like little shards of glass making their way down her throat. 'It's okay.' She tried to smile and it hurt, so unused to smiling with her mouth instead of her eyes, her lip bleeding.

He flinched like she'd hit him and then his eyes widened and he jerked for a completely different reason, shoving her roughly back out of the way.

Something fell past where she had been, scorching her hypersensitive skin viciously and burning the air out of her lungs as it passed by. She stumbled and threw a hand out to steady herself, felt her mistake in the flare of agony pushing its overheated way up her arm and let out a sound of pain and dismay, clutching her burnt hand to her chest.

'Raiku!'

'Calm down, you idiot, just wait a-,'

Daisukenojo's face, lit up on the other side of the burning pile obstructing her path through the smoke for a moment in focus, then lost to the blur again.

A dizzying moment of removal, another savage yank back to herself by the sound of wood splintering, cracking and expanding and the whoosh of falling leaves ablaze. It would be  _so easy_  just to fall down-

Raiku closed her eyes and drooped forward, now blinded almost completely by the thick, choking smoke, growing ever stronger.

She had to sleep. She had to rest.

'Raiku?! Raiku!'

Daisukenojo's voice was reaching a pitch he would ordinarily be ashamed off, a cry made out of an instinctive fear rather than a conscious decision.

'It's too dangerous!'

'Let me go!'

'We'll never make it, we have to go!'

'Raiku!'

A guttural sound and then nothing but the deafening cacophony of the fire.

Raiku let herself fall onto her hands heavily, felt her bones shake from the impact. Hands buried in the earth and grounding herself. Feeling power pour out of her and away, the scorched earth making her burnt skin sting even while it drained her dry.

She was so  _hungry_.

It had been gnawing at her gut where her fear usually sat and multiplied, but she could feel it so powerfully now. It spiked with a sharpness that made her gasp. Clawed at her insides voraciously, trying to find something rip apart and consume and finding nothing. A blind, visceral anger directed at no one was rising, stemming from that unassuageable hunger that was infiltrating every part of her and sinking into her mind, filling the space she had made for her few lucid thoughts and making demands in the red-dark back of her brain.

A sting of pain. Her teeth were bared in an expression she hadn't registered making. Blood was making its way down from the split in the dry flesh, down from perfectly white teeth on an ash-smudged face. Sparks flickered in each breath as she sunk further down.

Raiku wanted to be afraid. She  _should_  have been afraid, the fire was so close it was licking the air around her as if seeing how she'd taste and she'd been left behind. They had left her here and it wasn't because they wanted to, it was because they didn't want to die, which she could never have begrudged them. Not angry, but she knew she should be afraid. She knew she would be, usually was all the time, but…

She was  _starving_.

And it was strange, it felt like her emptiness was  _pulling_ , at first at her but she was starting to feel like it wasn't, quite, like it was pulling  _through_  her, using her skin to do something she didn't know how to do.

The smoke was thick, now, even down as low as Raiku was, provoking coughs each time she tried to breathe in.

A sharp wrench at her insides made her curl, gasping, around her abdomen, fingers sinking deeper into the soil and her heartbeat pulsing in her fingertips from the pressure.

No.

Not her heartbeat.

It was a pulse, she had recognised that much correctly, but it was now a dull tremor growing stronger by the second that she didn't understand.

And then she heard the  _noise_.

She hadn't registered it before, too far gone into the darkness in her vision in her head, too consumed by heat and hunger to really hear, but it was… it was  _everything_  all at once. A sound so intense it reverberated through her ribcage, down her spine and made her teeth feel like they were rattling inside her head.

Slowly, drawn inexorably, Raiku looked up.

Power.

The light in the sky, the roar she was hearing; electricity, raw power brewing, feeding on itself and getting stronger and stronger, thunder from the air splitting from its movement above and the  _pull_  from inside her skin drawing it and keeping it trapped in place, keeping it from dissipating. Dragging it down.

Dragging her up. She was climbing to her feet in the smoke, unable to look away. Eyes wide, fixed upwards in her trembling head.

Her teeth bared again, she knew, only because she could feel the sting of her lip and the hunger in her gaze. She reached a bare and open hand up as far as she could, barely as high as her eyes and watched tendrils of electricity split the air in front of her to connect to her fingers, thin as spider silk, felt its power and its belonging and the warmth inside her that felt so much like love and she was

_starving._

Her soul lit up and her mind went dark and Raiku inhaled smoke, fisted her hand and  _pulled._

 

 

 

 

 

'Raiku.'

She blinked awake with sudden clarity at the sound of her name.

There was no one there.

There was no one anywhere.

Raiku blinked again, hard and repeatedly to get the fuzziness out of her vision and found herself lying on her back again, staring at the sky. It was a soft grey of mottled clouds, gently casting white light over everything.

Daylight.

She blinked again and felt something brush over her cheek, raised her hand to see what it was and heard the faint sound of something dislodging. Ash was pouring off her hand as it came into view, only to touch more on her face. She stared at it, uncomprehending for a long while, until she put it back down.

She was in no pain but felt detached, cast adrift from her body even as she was, undeniably, present.

Her brow wrinkled ever so slightly.

She'd… been injured…?

She sat up slowly, watching the ash flake off her skin and remaining clothes unevenly, leaving her with pure white patches under the pale grey. She put a hand to her side cautiously and gasped at a sudden, violent surge of nausea, panting until it passed. No pain, not anywhere, so she decided not to do it again and that she wouldn't question it for now.

She raised her head to try and understand where she was. It was impossible to tell.

Grey.

Layers of ash covered everything, but there was little to be seen- in the distance, vague shapes could be seen, but nothing distinctive, and the earth before that and all around her, as far as she could see, was totally bare. Motes and flecks of ash drifted in the air, so slowly it felt like she was underwater, in some kind of suspension that rendered the world and air perfectly still. There were no landmarks, nothing that could be recognised. Just the burnt world. Until she saw it: a strange earthen spire, some distance away, and its height impossible to gauge without something nearby to gauge it against.

Raiku slowly, carefully, manoeuvred herself onto her feet, feeling strangely light. She took a tentative step in the spire's general direction and looked down. Her foot had sunken into the ash, a much thicker layer than she thought, and she could barely feel the soil underneath.

Was she dreaming, she wondered?

No. She couldn't be. She could feel her energy, even if didn't feel the way it usually did, and she had never before sensed it in a dream. It was at a high level, but languid under her skin, almost sliding instead of buzzing. It made her feel oddly content and dazed, made each step towards the landmark easier, automatic. She set off towards it with an odd sort of grace that came from her weightlessness, the heaviness of her constant, low-key hunger lifted and leaving her almost insensate.

Her Plot was happy to see her, she found along her path, slithering through the ash and leaving a solid black trail of exposed earth behind it. She found herself smiling slightly at the sight of it, strangely relieved. So she wasn't over yet, so this was still happening. It wiggled ecstatically at her recognition, circling around behind. She followed it with her eyes for a moment, seeing her trail of black footprints in the soft grey ash, before continuing onwards.

Each inhale, each exhale made the ash suspended in the air shift and flurry away, clinging to her clothes, her skin, her eyelashes until she reached it. She felt herself sway when she stopped, only slightly, enough to become aware that the dreamlike, soft world was starting to move, slightly. The dead air was being stirred by some small, brave wind, and this interlude was going to end soon.

The pillar was rough and jagged, slightly taller than her but far thicker. She tilted her head and her eyes flicked over it, before she felt a slight twinge in that disembodied part of her brain that registered chakra. She reached out and tapped it with one fingernail, sparks jumping harmlessly off it.

No response.

Raiku smoothed her hand against it and smiled to herself a little at the sensation, so unfamiliar, and then formed a fist.

She knocked, politely. It echoed a little, part of it undoubtedly hollow.

There was a long silence after the faint reverberations faded, before the sound of crumbling. Raiku stepped backwards nimbly, withdrawing to a safe distance as ash and earth shook itself off the formation, at first just soil, then larger pieces snapping off with tiny surges of chakra, until a young man staggered out of the ruin, black with dirt and limbs shaking violently.

Raiku cautiously peered over at him, tilting her head to the side to try and see his face when he fell to hands and knees in obvious weakness, obvious exhaustion. She caught a glimpse of yellow snaking down his neck under the dirt and smiled with the warmth of recognition.

Iwao eventually looked up at her, panting, eyes glazed over.

'Good job, Konishi,' Raiku greeted, some white-grey spectre in his gaze, eyes so bright, skin as pale as her hair and such a smile, electricity in her teeth. 'You thought fast.'

 

 

 

 

 

The attempt to use Iwao's compass had failed immediately, needle pointing unerringly towards Raiku and so they had used the mountain to make a rough guess as to which direction they needed to go. Raiku's euphoric high was fading with the return of her more earthly concerns- her burnt hand twinging with each movement, the pain of her bare feet across the ground as the ash slowly faded into earth, complete with sticks and rocks. The vague line she had seen on the distance was, as she had thought, more forest, but only the thinnest of lines on the other side of a small river that must have protected it from the fire, the secondary blast that Iwao had cautiously described to her. He had struggled to walk, at first, his obvious depletion and some small injuries making him stagger and fall, often. Raiku had hovered each time, unable to help him even slightly because of her own state of disarray, her remaining clothes fashioned into a haphazard covering of the essentials that she was steadfastly refusing to dwell on.

Each time, he got back up and she breathed a sigh of relief, a helpless bystander. Each time. After a while he seemed to function more or less out of sheer force of will, doggedly keeping pace with her.

After an age of silence, she had been able to prompt him enough to get a picture of what had happened.

There had been one, massive blast of electricity somewhere near Iwao and Yamada, which Yamada had protected him and one of the twins from, but that had started an enormous forest fire and obliterated a large section nearby completely. They'd spread out to look for their team and Iwao had found the other twin, who had stayed behind to help Team Yamada.

Iwao, like Raiku, had fallen behind and been left there in the panic, using an earth release to protect him at the last minute, but knowing it wouldn't keep the fire off him for long. Another explosion had rocked the area and Iwao had lost consciousness, but it must have been the end of the fire, since otherwise, he would have been cooked alive inside the spire.

It didn't quite fill the gaps in her memory- Iwao hadn't suspected Raiku's involvement, was passing his suspicions off even now as delusions from his trauma, from his exhaustion, which had made him mercifully accepting of her flimsy excuses for surviving.

They were quietly unified in their relief at having survived, their relief at having found each other and not being alone, and also in the mutual knowledge that they were closer to Sand than to Konoha and if they were found by someone else before they reached either, they would die.

Iwao was the one who eventually broke their silence after Raiku's attempts at starting conversation had failed some time earlier, still steadfastly not looking at her. 'You need to have that wound looked at.'

Raiku felt a lurch of nausea at the reminder, sickly instead of pained, dizzy instead of disturbed. 'No,' she managed after a heavy swallow. 'I think we should leave it for now.'

'It must hurt.'

'It doesn't.'

Unremarkably, this didn't seem to cheer him up at all. 'We're far from help. You should go on without me and send somebody back.'

Raiku eyed him with a weary expression. They both knew that he would probably have succumbed or been picked off by the time he could get back. He was being kind, but also, unacceptably self-sacrificing.

The shinobi side of her told her to take the deal and run.

The Gairano side wailed and started setting off Drama alarms, pointing out how many personal story arcs were kicked off by survivor guilt.

The newly formed, still malleable Raiku part smacked him on the back of the head and only felt a little guilty when it almost knocked him over.

'I am not going to have your noble sacrifice resting on my conscience forever. That's the first pitfall of Angst. Someone has to die for it.' Her Plot sagged in disappointment.

He didn't seem to get it, probably assumed she was rambling, that her injury and her blood loss was finally getting to her. Raiku kept stride with him until the sound of the river reached her ears and the air started feeling slightly moist, a blessing each time her scorched lungs drew it in. She ran, or jogged, really, towards it, cautious but desperate and sank to her knees in the damp earth next to it, uncaring of the mud sticking to her skin and remembered herself just in time to stop her from plunging her hands into it.

Her soul almost cracked when she had to stop inches away from it. She could  _feel_  the cooler air, it was clear and clean and the  _smell_ -

She forced herself to shuffle back before she could give in to the temptation. If she touched it, it would ionise and heavy water wasn't safe in large quantities. She watched longingly as Iwao finally arrived and stuck his hands in.

When he'd drunk enough for her throat to start burning enviously, she flicked her eyes meaningfully to the river and then his canteen, over and over, until he slowly filled it up and gave it to her, clearly not understanding why she hadn't just done what he had. She smiled at him, which obviously unsettled him when he could see her whole face. Unsurprising. Most people were disturbed by it after they'd gotten used to seeing her covered face, feeling like it was some violation of her privacy, like she just had  _too much face_.

When she'd drained it twice and started using it to wash her face and neck, Iwao stopped in the middle of his own limited washing to stare into the river. She could see him flush on his wet face, eyes fixed down. Obviously about to ask or accuse her of something that his withdrawn nature found uncomfortable.

'It was you.'

Raiku grasped the meaning immediately and smiled at him again, sad and weary and mostly just accepting. He glanced at her, then back down, going slightly more red and clearly frustrated with himself at getting embarrassed at now, of all times.

She resumed and started rinsing off her arms until he spoke again.

'…I won't tell anyone.'

When she looked at him in genuine surprise, pleased as she was, he had already shifted away. '…Let's go. We have a long way to go until we get to Sand.'

Raiku laughed, startled and glad.


	41. one conductive labradoodle

Iwao had mostly recovered by the time they reached the outskirts of the desert, almost two days later. His problems had largely been solved with rest, his injuries minor enough that his chakra depletion had been the greatest risk to him. He was practically a new shinobi by the time the windswept, towering dunes became visible across the horizon, as well as a foreboding shimmer of heat emanating from them.

Raiku had not.

She felt sick.

Iwao had taken to twitching with thinly veiled anxiety the further they went and forcing stops as often as the morning of the second day, however, it was obvious that resting wasn't going to be enough, that Raiku's energy and enthusiasm were coming wholly from her ability and her willpower. By the third, she was running entirely on the potent energy that her body generated in seemingly endless supply, hadn't been able to eat even what little they had. He'd braved a look at her injury and there was no sign of infection, just an ugly, gaping series of gashes that bled sluggishly when she strained herself. But that had been the first day and she'd been like a wounded animal in her protection of it ever since.

From his perspective, her strained cheer and seemingly endless supply of optimism, even as she visibly deteriorated, had to be a mask for the pain she was experiencing.

From Raiku's, it was genuine. Iwao was nice. And emotionally stunted, but nice. This was already a pretty shitty trip, so there was no need to make it more unpleasant by brooding and generally making a nuisance of herself.

Her Plot disagreed. Several times, she had found it leaning towards her and promising Dramatic Monologues, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. And by the time she realised they were in Wind Country, she was too tired and in truth, a little too disoriented. The sight of that intense heat shimmering over the shifting golden sand was unbearable, the warmth they had been dealing with already intolerable.

Raiku made her way to a tree cautiously and leaned against it, slowly sliding down into a seated position. Iwao padded over quickly and sort of hovered as close as he felt was safe, his hands twitching at his sides with the restrained desire to  _do_  something. She smiled at him tiredly, giving it her best shot even if he was inconsiderately blurry. The light breeze was dry, but chilled the sweat she hadn't registered on her forehead and neck. 'I don't think I can do that,' she said, moving her head a little towards the desert.

'Yes you can,' he told her firmly.

She smiled at him again, wanly. 'I don't have any shoes and neither do you. I'd be dragging myself through glass.'

'Your chakra-,'

She snorted and shot him a look of patronising amusement. He fell silent for a moment and rose to his feet, starting to pace nearby in thought. She knew she'd been making it worse, but she hadn't been sleeping. Raiku hadn't been able to bring herself to close her eyes for even minutes at a time over the past few days, so worried that in her state, she would lose herself again, killing Iwao and who knew who else. They didn't have enough water to make it across the desert at the pace they'd been going, and she was already feverish and dehydrated almost constantly. She was going to be a burden and if Iwao didn't go on without her, they were both going to die of exposure. They had no shelter, either, had been doing the best with what they had, which would be nothing in the desert.

She could try to use her ability to make her way across the desert. She would be fast enough, certainly, but she didn't feel comfortable doing it, given what had happened the last time she had done so with her current health problems. In addition, she would probably be killed immediately by Sand's defenses, who wouldn't know that she wasn't a threat. They would detect her the second she was in range, and then she'd be exposed. Forever. To a village that only a short few months ago had invaded Konoha, the hometown that probably thought she was dead and so wouldn't go looking for her if they decided to abduct her. Which was probably overestimating her own importance, but her father had made it very clear that it was an issue; especially obvious now that she knew Ryuu was a child of gene theft, that he'd been stolen because of what his DNA let him do.

The only logical thing to do would be for Iwao to take the majority of the water and to travel as fast as possible to get help, and she just needed him to reach that conclusion.

'Look,' she said generously, deciding he was taking too long. 'I'm not gonna die if you leave me for a few hours-,'

'Then why didn't you leave me?' he responded immediately, with what she now knew to be uncharacteristic assertiveness.

She rolled her eyes. 'Because you would have died-  _okay_ , I see how you might be confused,' she admitted with a thoughtful frown. Eloquence wasn't Raiku's field, really, but she gave it her best shot. 'I'm not bleeding or … oozing, so I can't really be in any danger, but I can't keep up and we're not far from your patrol zone. You'd be back before the day was even over!'

Iwao glared at her, which she no longer found intimidating after finding out he had once left his marking paint lying around and his little brother had used it to finger-paint all over him in an attempt to be helpful.

'Come on. I'll be fine. If anyone comes, I'll just explode them! And no one's looking for us right now anyway.' She was actually not entirely confident in her ability to explode anyone right now without exploding everything, but he really needed to leave. Then she could finally spark herself up and kill any nasty bacteria that were swimming around in her injury. She'd never consciously done it before, but she'd also never gotten sick or infected before, so her dad had made the intuitive leap and she knew he was good at that sort of thing.

Iwao hesitated, clearly on the edge of giving in.

Raiku summoned another smile, her eyebrows raised slightly to give her a look somewhat like a plaintive labradoodle. 'I don't want to die. I wouldn't say it was a good idea if I didn't think you'd come back in time.'

And she could finally get some sleep, without having to worry about accidentally murdering him.

Iwao swallowed and it looked like he was on the verge of giving in. She let her head drop back against the tree and flapped a hand at him dismissively. 'Mush. Go.'

After a moment, she felt something press into her hand and then felt him spring away with haste. When she finally could be bothered, she lifted her hand to look at it and laughed, surprised yet again.

She tied the scant piece of fabric around her nose and mouth and felt better for it, felt something deep inside her relax a little.

She took this time to let the rest of her relax, concentrating on the tense knots of pain in the tops of her calves, paying special attention to the nasty ones in the small of her back and sighed in relief. Finally. Some space. She had a lot to work out, and she was already starting to doze as Iwao rapidly left her chakra sensory range.

But how much of what happened had been a hallucination? Her hand was burnt, so she knew that she had fallen. But afterwards? The smoke had been smothering; her lungs were aching even now. It could have been a dream, but that didn't explain the second explosion Iwao had described. It was possible that she had collapsed a second time and the first cause had repeated itself. She'd never felt the urge or even the possibility of that  _pulldragdevour_  that still flashed so vividly.

God, this was just too hard and her head was spinning already. She could just tell her dad, later, provided that Iwao didn't… oh, she didn't know, pass out on the way to Sand and not wake up in time to send someone before she withered away.

Raiku groaned in realisation of her own stupidity.

'Oh god _damn_  it.'

 

 

 

 

 

Luckily, Raiku had plenty of time to dwell on her possible mistake as hours passed. She was eventually forced to move further back into the cooler, more forgiving shade, still keeping the desert edge close by but deeply reluctant to let herself bake in the steadily encroaching sun. She dozed in brief bursts and kept jolting awake, the phantom feeling of stepping through the ashen shell of a man making her foot itch. She was going to have to go to a family trauma counsellor. They were going to receive  _gift baskets_.

Oh who was she kidding, she loved gift baskets. Especially the ones with the little muffins in them. She swallowed at the thought of food, awkwardly draped over a log in an attempt to alleviate the throbbing that had started in her side a few hours earlier. Her mouth and throat were dry. How long ago, before they had parted, had they passed a water source?

She squinted at the sky to try and remember and realised that it was changing colour, slowly. No stars, yet. But it was getting late in the day. It was going to get dark. Not quickly, not at this time of year, but… quickly enough. If she was going to go and get water, it would have to be immediately.

But how far?

She couldn't remember. What if the return party missed her? If she was gone too long and they assumed she'd been picked off?

But then… what if Iwao had fallen unconscious, or been injured? Or lost?! She could die waiting.

Raiku groaned with indecision and rubbed her face wearily. Why couldn't this just be over, already? Why was she being kept in a state of constant gnawing  _waiting_ , always-

She glowered in warning at the Plot, which slunk a little further away guiltily, and felt her head clear a little. She drifted for a while in a state neither fully asleep nor awake and when she regained full consciousness, it had almost entirely passed into nightfall, the dim, pale light of some hidden moon making faint shapes through the trees.

She side-eyed the direction she had remembered the desert being. She should go over there. She should make herself as visible as possible.

Raiku exhaled heavily and waited until the resulting wave of nausea had crested before she hauled herself to her feet, immediately grabbing onto a nearby tree to help her balance. Her touch cracked and scorched it but didn't destroy it completely, which was something that gave her… mixed feelings. She pushed off it and propelled herself towards another that she propped her fist against for balance, unwilling to expose the burnt and blistered skin directly. Another violent surge of nausea accompanied the move and she swallowed back the taste of stomach acid rising at the back of her throat with a grimace.

This was getting tedious.

She pushed through stubbornly and found herself suddenly adrift without support at the edge of the trees in freefall before she landed on one knee in the dirt, only narrowly missing the first smatterings of sand. Not that she could see them, but she was having a curious, disembodied sense of things, grown stronger since her unfortunate… incident. She had tried not to pay too much attention to it, but she gingerly shifted back to sit cross-legged and felt that maybe it was time she addressed it.

She couldn't feel the trees, but she had felt a visceral tug of almost glee when they'd approached water, a fainter pull now that stretched into the desert.

Raiku shook her head before she hung it, already knowing the answer. Conductors. Carbon didn't conduct well, so the trees weren't prominent. Water was, sand was… well, sand was sand. She could practically  _taste_  them, could feel herself being drawn towards things that would conduct for her. Sadly, it wasn't enough to tell her where the  _goddamn river was._

This was just ridiculous. Her name was terrible enough without her actually  _acting_  like an electrical current. She was a human. She had legs that carried her around, she didn't need… non-resistant elements to transport her from place to place.

This begged another question entirely. Could she use them? Or would her skin act as a barrier; was she just aching past the anchor that kept her in her bones?

Idly, Raiku tilted her head back to look at the sky. It was comforting, in a way; it still filled her with the same sublime awe, to remember that she was sitting on a green-blue ball, spinning in the dark and that none of this crap mattered to the universe.

All Gairano loved space. It made them feel small and unimportant. It made them feel dwarfed by the impossible, unknowable reaches of an objective truth, rather than the pretenders that they had to chase out of their homes with brooms on a daily basis.

For some reason, however, it lacked its usual punch. Probably because, after days of nausea and no appetite, Raiku was horrified to feel herself feeling... hungry. She ruthlessly quashed it and saw in surprise that her breath fogged a little in the air.

Right. The desert got cold at night.

Fortunately, Raiku didn't, so that was one peril that could be ignored. She almost wished for it - it would be a perfect distraction.

After a while, her strange conductor sense started to detect something.

To her extreme irritation, it did so long before her chakra senses did, despite her only having had it for days rather than  _years_.

It was for that reason that she refused to look into it for a moment, fuming, before she realised that it was probably a shinobi. She tried to keep herself calm, telling herself that it was probably help.

_But what if it wasn't?_

Raiku found herself crackling at the fingertips and tucked them under her armpits, almost fainted when she forgot one armpit was  _not_  viable, and instead awkwardly crammed them both under one, looking like she was imitating a lopsided chicken.

With the greatest of reluctance, she extended her new awareness. It hit her with an intensity she wasn't ready for when she dove into it.

Metal.

It wrapped itself around her mind with a sense of intense satisfaction, a powerful drag that almost forced her onto her feet.

Sand.

That was less expected, almost invisible in her mind amongst the rest of the sand in the entire damn desert, but approaching, somehow? She frowned and shook her head.

Then, the less interesting. Water, diluted amounts. Carbon, mostly.

From the mix, she could hazard a guess of shinobi, one carrying enormous quantities of … sand.

Raiku almost wailed in frustration and a little bit of fear when she finally cottoned on to what that meant, fisting her hands in her hair. No! No no no no  _no_!

Seized with the intensity of her reaction, she glowered at the sky. 'You! You did this!' she accused the universe, who unsurprisingly said nothing but seemed to glimmer down at her disapprovingly. Then she started coughing, her dry throat unused to speaking and certainly not hydrated enough, which made her calm down.

After a few moments of deep, careful breathing, she refocused herself.

There were four of them, she hazarded to guess. Maybe three, maybe five. Or maybe seventeen, she had no idea. Her guess was mainly based on how much metal the average shinobi carried, and wasn't necessarily accurate. The force split and it made her head ache when she instinctively tried to follow it for a moment, her awareness dissipating with her focus.

Great. They'd split up.

She eyed the shimmering sand balefully. She had a choice, here. She could roll herself onto the sand and then Gaara (if it was Gaara) would know where she was immediately. Or, or! Her brain pointed out hysterically, she could do  _literally anything else_.

Raiku tilted her head. 'You make a good point, brain,' she muttered. 'I could do that.'

But.

But.

She couldn't, really.

With a whimpering sound of unhappiness, Raiku pitched forward and dragged herself along a few steps. Her side started to burn and she told it that it could just go… screw itself, because she had enough to worry about and it was just going to have to suck it up.

Hesitating over and over, Raiku eventually took a deep breath and put one bare hand on a long stream of sand that stretched into the dirt. With a flash and a surge of heat that made her feel sticky and uncomfortably aware of the sweat she had slowly accumulated over the past several days, it fused and melted and stuck to her fingers uncomfortably. Despite herself, she watched with interest what happened: the extremely coarse and still sandy glass, fluid as it was, appeared as a stream of silver snaking into the edge of the desert because of the reflection of the starlight, stretching outwards before it cooled almost immediately.

And  _there_  it was.

Raiku lifted her hand free of the thickly oozing glass with a sigh, her chakra sense now picking up one of the others beelining for her.

Oh good.

This wasn't going to be awkward.

Maybe if she dug a hand into her injury, she could pass out and avoid explaining anything, plus avoid actually talking to Gaara!

It said terrible things about Raiku that she seriously considered this with hope for a moment, before that hope dashed itself on the sharp rock of reality, "Gairano" chiseled into its side.

No, because then when he tried to retrieve her, he'd get electrocuted then squish her for vengeance. Or stab her. Or strangle her - well no, not strangle, but something!

Also, the fact remained that Raiku wasn't a masochist, actually hated pain, and couldn't even look at her injury without wanting to vomit. She was a wimp. She knew that. That's why she hung her head and made sure her mask was on properly before she looked up, waiting for Gaara's red hair to appear over the nearest dune like the world's most psychopathic sunrise.

He didn't take long. Of course he didn't take long. He was in his element, which was the opposite of her element, which made him the worst.

Raiku wasn't thinking clearly, she knew that, but damn it,  _the point remained_.

And there.

She must have been dozing or losing time again, which she desperately didn't want to consider, because the next thing Raiku registered was looking up at Gaara, while he looked down at her. Not knowing how long he'd been there, if he was really there at all. No - he had to be. She felt herself gravitating towards him, hungry for the promise of conductivity in the sand and trace metal, of power and movement before she stopped herself.

She'd been using electricity to keep herself awake, had been running on it instead of sleep and food and chakra and now it was getting greedy again, not finding the resources to burn in her that it it was going elsewhere, but it couldn't go there, she thought hysterically. Anywhere but there!

The silence stretched on.

She noted, with a sort of giddy hysteria, that the starlight made his hair look violet. Violet was maybe the least intimidating of all colours.

'You are not that terrifying,' Raiku told him, and closed her eyes briefly to try and block the words out. 'I mean,' she corrected in a slow rasp. 'You are. But not… oh god,' she sighed, shaking her head and putting it in her hands. 'I can't. I just… I'm just too tired.' And it hummed. He was armed. Barely, but the metal  _sang_  inside her head. She wanted it. She was so weak from blood loss and hunger and thirstier than she had ever been, more tired than she could remember. She just…  _wanted._

Gaara said nothing, but the smell of blood was in the air. She could hear sand shifting around his feet, felt more than saw him turn to look at her little glass spider-web.

She groaned again and told herself it was from disgust because that she knew where that sand had been, but she knew that the truth was she was too drained to care. She just  _hungered_. She seemed to be doing it a lot lately. 'Can we just… pretend I was unconscious?'

Gaara turned back to look at her, black-rimmed eyes glaring at her. But she didn't like it. They looked…

She looked away, unwilling to meet his gaze.

They looked as though a thought was occurring to him that had not before.

Did  _everyone_  have to find out about this today? Wasn't it enough that she'd killed a few people; didn't that fill her Drama quota? Was it not enough that she was injured and drying up and seriously contemplating self-harm? Could she reasonably pass this off as a defensive jutsu? It wasn't like any of the Sand Siblings were idiots. No, they were all stupidly talented, non-gullible... things...

So she wasn't at her best.

He crouched, sandals crunching a little in the sand. Unwillingly, Raiku met his gaze.

Gaara never blinked. It was her least favourite thing about him. Other than his apparent desire to kill her, but she was able to excuse that pretty easily since it was a recurring flaw in the people she met.

'You said you'd kill me one day,' she reminded him, stupidly, but the Plot apparently decided that she couldn't be trusted with her own words and took over. 'Could that… not be today?'

Wow. It was even less eloquent than she was.

_Oh please, Mister, don't murder me!_

_Well, you make a persuasive point, little lightning bug. I guess I'll spare your pathetic life_.

She laughed a little despite her best efforts, shoulders shaking in silent amusement. This seemed to irk Gaara a little. Or maybe that was just his face.

Wait.

That wasn't just his normal face.

Gaara was looking deep into her eyes, which was even harder than usual, since she could feel energy shifting to beam through the iris, trying to get as close to the sand he was covered in as possible. Extra bright. But he didn't really know how to not be intense, she reassured herself.

He reached for her arm with one bare hand and she flinched away immediately. She realised her mistake when this made his eyes narrow a little further and raised the arm in question, glowing slightly and crackling. She was too tired, now. She couldn't bring herself to speak and her head was lolling to one side, but he seemed to get the message, because his face once again smoothed into something blank. He moved - she heard the rustling of fabric and why hadn't she noticed that her eyes had closed? - and a moment later, something rough touched the bare skin of her arm. That surprised her - Gaara never touched anyone. Not ever. Even through a fabric barrier, which she was sure it was.

Then again, it wasn't like he had a choice.

'Hey, you found her! That was fast,' someone called approvingly.

More metal, more than Gaara. She found herself leaning forward with no memory of having done so, eyes fixed hungrily on someone standing atop the dune Gaara had crossed.  _Metalmetalmetal_  -

Gaara nodded to his brother, tying a knot that was slightly too tight around Raiku's upper arm, keeping a drape of fabric fixed in place before he moved to do the same to her other. Raiku made an injured, animalistic sound of pain and pulled away, eyes glazed over with sickness and agony. Gaara paused, the sand around his ankles shifting, and she felt Kankuro immediately dart over at the warning sign. It was Kankuro who knelt and accepted the fabric from Gaara, using it to lift her left arm up despite Raiku's feeble attempts to get away, her lucidity decreasing from the pain.

'Doesn't look good,' she heard, the words muffled by the ringing in her ears. 'Why didn't you use your sand?' Kankuro's voice was always more respectful when he spoke to his younger brother, never as brash as it was with others.

'She resisted.'

'I'm surprised that stopped you,' Kankuro smirked, moving a finger in front of Raiku's eyes to see if she could follow it. She could, but only through guesswork, which he immediately noticed.

Gaara had drawn back, arms folded across his chest, as distant and unapproachable as ever. He said nothing. He just watched her, teal eyes tracking her smallest movements. The hunger in her eyes as she scanned Kankuro for - something, it wasn't clear what. The tiny flickers of light under her skin.

Gaara narrowed his eyes and Kankuro masked his shudders with the ease of years of practice. He snapped his fingers in front of her face and she tracked the movement greedily - the backs of his gloves had metal plates in them that were starting to vibrate slightly at her proximity, becoming magnetised, but seemingly not enough for him to notice.

'Please,' she said hoarsely, wrenching her gaze up to Kankuro's painted face. She couldn't muster up anything, anymore. The energy she had been using was letting her down and she was falling, failing. So 'please,' she said again, eyelids drooping.

Kankuro responded appropriately, for once. 'She's fading fast,' he said over his shoulder with a frown. 'Are you sure you can't take h-'

Raiku pitched forward at last, into Kankuro's chest and dimly heard his sound of surprise, just thankful that she felt no surge of electrocution when she made contact.


	42. family and emotionally damaged starfish

Raiku drifted easily in a medicine-bitter darkness until she felt the distinct and oddly familiar sensation of someone poking her in the face repeatedly. She tried to ignore it and sink back into a more peaceful oblivion, a particularly hard jab made her conscious mind resurface with a twinge of irritation.

This set the mood for her entire revival. She didn't wake slowly or by degrees, as she had the last few times she had been hospitalized, but felt more as if she were dredging herself forcefully out of some mire of haziness and sleep until her senses sharpened enough for her to start processing where she was.

Unfortunately, where she was turned out to be mere inches away from a white and purple blotch. This, understandably, gave her pause. Something had clearly gone terribly wrong with her brain if that was what it was insisting was in front of her. She felt bleary-eyed and heavy. She felt sluggish and, frankly, a little grouchy, and she was in no mood for mysterious blurs.

She gave it a half-hearted swat and saw a long white shape that she assumed was her arm, mercifully fully covered. The blur retreated a little and suddenly a yellow light flashed into existence, making her screw her eyes shut against the glare. When the pain stopped, she creaked them back open very slowly, head turned away from what she now realized was a bedside lamp. Probably. Or maybe a very small woman holding a lantern, but the lamp idea seemed more plausible. Trying to give her eyes enough time to adjust to the light also gave her enough space to try and focus them, though it was an uphill battle.

It took a few minutes, and then all she wanted was to take it back. Kankuro was  _not_  something she was prepared for this early in the - she squinted at the window through her eyelashes - early evening. Maybe very very early morning? Night-time. Night-ish.

'Thank god,' Kankuro groaned, settling back into an uncomfortable-looking wicker chair and stretching so hard his back popped. 'This watch was so  _boring_  with you just lying there like an emotionally damaged starfish.'

Raiku made a sound that was part-groan, part-mumble, but that was wholly uncertain she had heard his last sentence correctly. She wasn't sure what she'd been trying to say, in truth, so when he raised his terrifying purple eyebrows at her, she didn't try again. She did, however, stretch her white-clad arms out to the water pitcher on her bedside table beseechingly, fingers wavering a little in the air as though that would make them stretch further.  **  
**

He grinned, purple painted lips stretching obscenely and obligingly picked it up for her. She sighed happily, but then he held it out of reach on his lap, seemingly just wanting to have it close to him. For emotional support in this trying time.

Raiku hated him a little, in that moment. But retaliation was out of the question since she was clearly drugged to the eyeballs and the IV she had just noticed was apparently supplying her with both fluids and painkillers. Consequently, the connection of it and her arm was a love affair she wasn't willing to risk.

She stared at him, sadly. Kankuro was completely unaffected, because he was a monster. And she couldn't keep it up for very long, either, because she was slowly becoming aware of a throbbing headache pounding behind her eyes and each temple. She had to drop her arms after a moment, because her muscles felt like they'd been pulled through a taffy machine.

When she finally gave up, Kankuro leaned forward and poured her a glass of water as though that had been his plan all along. She was too grateful to care, particularly when he helped her support the glass against her lips. She felt the fabric of her mask dampen and stick to her face and couldn't care less, too tired to pull it down and completely unwilling to let Kankuro do it for her.

After an age she leaned back into her pillow with a blissful sigh and heard him set down the glass.

'So!'

Kankuro snatched a clipboard from the top of the chest of drawers next to him, slid the pen out from under the clip and started reading from it.

'What is your name - oh, that's easy, I got that one.' He scribbled something on it. 'What is your gender - misc-ell-a-neous. How old are you?' He shot her a critical glance before turning back to the page and clicking the pen a few times in thought. '… Eleven.'

Raiku made a feeble growling sound.

'Ten.'

She glowered at him.

He smirked and tapped the clipboard with a pen, never mind the fact that these were definitely questions she was supposed to answer. Probably to check to see whether she'd sustained brain damage. 'Use your words.'

Raiku cleared her throat, having to do it a few times before she could get a word out.

'Thirteen.'

Kankuro pulled a face, which bordered on the grotesque with the way his face-paint shifted in the yellow light. 'Gross. Next! What village are you from? Grass-munching … hippy-town,' he sounded out slowly as he wrote.

'Konoha,' she rasped. She had no idea if he actually changed his answer, he just moved on.

'What day is it?'

Raiku frowned. '… s'night-time?'

Kankuro clicked his tongue against his teeth. 'Bad sign, bad sign.'

He knew  _damn well_  that she had no way of knowing. Raiku was too tired to fume and too relieved at being warm and safe to muster real anger, so she just sort of simmered in mild discontentment.

'How did you barbecue like five trained medic-nin?'

Raiku squinted. That question didn't seem to be keeping with the theme, somehow, but her drug-addled mind wasn't keen on examining it too closely. That seemed too much like hard work, so it let her conditioned response take over. 'Pr'tective jutsu,' she mumbled.

Kankuro eyed her for a moment and then moved on. 'What is the name of the current Kazekage - oh, there's no one yet. You fail that question. This isn't looking good for you or your grey matter,' he added with a devilish glint in his eye. 'Current leader-slash-elected representative of your place of residence?'

'Tsunade?' she offered tentatively.

'Last name?'

Raiku paused, but didn't actually know. She stretched her long fingers out on a quest for the remote that would either up her meds or summon someone to take him away, while he continued on, shaking his head. 'How many fingers am I holding up?'

He held up thumb and forefinger.

'Two,' Raiku answered, a note of victory in her voice.

Kankuro sighed sadly. 'Only one. Seeing double. Bad sign.'

'But-,'

'Ooh, a thumb's not a finger,' he tsked. 'Cognitive… function…  _clearly_  impaired…' he drew out with relish, his wide smirk reminding her vividly of how many times he'd beaten her at Mercy without getting bored.

Raiku let her head fall back in despair and pressed the button for morphine repeatedly in the vain hope that she'd either overdose or pass out.

By the time dawn broke and a warmer light spilled into the room, two things had become clear.

The first was that Kankuro did not, in fact, get tired of victimizing her and he was also actually under instructions to keep her awake despite her best efforts to doze off. He always nabbed her with some terrible, terrible way of keeping her miserably, thoroughly conscious and most of the time, horrified. The last part he seemed to view as compensation for his troubles.

The second was that Kankuro, or some nurse in that was in  _cahoots_  with Kankuro, had disabled the button.

Raiku still pressed it sadly on occasion just to hear the empty click.

That click was what betrayal sounded like.

It was also, she had figured out with some spiteful trace of amusement, the only way she could get back at Kankuro for his misdeeds. She was almost catatonic again by daybreak and he'd become increasingly direct, now just jabbing her to stop her from dozing off. In response, she either clicked the button slower or faster, depending on how aggressive he was being. And the best part was that  _he couldn't take it away from her_.

Raiku smothered the malevolent giggle bubbling up inside her chest.  **  
**

A tiny muscle in his eye was twitching even before the night shift for nurses had ended. She watched it with sick fascination, testing to see if she could change its frequency with her clicking. **  
**

Kankuro began emitting a deep, drawn-out growl when she started clicking it to a nonsensical and inconsistent rhythm, fingers tightening on the arms of his terrible wicker chair. 'That is _it_!'

Raiku squawked and clutched the little remote to her protectively, but he barely had time to wrap a broad hand around her small wrist before a voice interrupted him.

'Kankuro.'

Kankuro froze in the beginning of a yank, leaving Raiku's arm suspended awkwardly between them. She quickly traded the remote to her other hand and clicked it furiously in panic. Which made no sense as it couldn't help her in any way, but she still found the movement oddly comforting.

Kankuro's eye twitched again but he released her, to her profound surprise. The clicks trailed off uncertainly as she wondered what was going on, but it all became very clear when he removed himself from her personal space and she could see the doorframe.

A man with a veil of cloth covering the left side of his face frowned at Kankuro disapprovingly. He was dressed in the uniform of a Sand Jounin and something about him triggered recognition in Raiku's mind. The Chuunin exams…? No, she didn't think that was it. While she was puzzling it out, the man had folded his arms across his chest and addressed Kankuro. 'You're relieved. Go home.'

Kankuro almost smiled, but then suddenly tensed and frowned. 'I don't think-,'

'Go. Home,' the man repeated more firmly.

Raiku rejoined the conversation when Kankuro grabbed his hood off the chair and shot her a broad smirk. It made her skin crawl a little but she visibly sagged with relief and smiled when he moved around the Jounin to leave.

She recognized her mistake when that made room for her to see Gaara.

He was glaring at her. Maybe that was just his face, but it looked like he was glaring at her.

She became aware she was still smiling at him and cringed a little. She wanted desperately to still feel relieved that Kankuro wasn't the one keeping an eye on her anymore, but couldn't. Maybe she could suggest that one of her teammates come to keep her company?

Actually, come to think of it…

Raiku frowned to herself and wracked her uncooperative brain to try and remember if Kankuro had mentioned them at all. Was…

Was it possible they had never made it?

She was so deep in thought that she missed Gaara setting his gourd down against the chair and then sitting in it, keeping those blank green eyes fixed on her.

'Hey,' she said hesitantly. The ache in her throat made her desperately want more water, but she didn't want to even twitch in his direction, lest he decide it was an insult and crush her.

Gaara didn't look away but also didn't say anything, which she took as permission to continue.

'Has… Is my team…?'

Raiku found herself unable to verbalize the question of whether they were alive; she couldn't bring herself to even picture the alternative, which she knew spoke of an inappropriately powerful attachment. Her medicated mind refused to feel sorry for possessing it, though it was sorry that she hadn't thought to ask Kankuro, whose irreverence may have been infuriating but who at least theoretically possessed some empathy. **  
**

After an age of letting her squirm, Gaara spoke.

'They're here.'

Raiku's breath escaped her in a shaky rush of relief. She closed her eyes for a moment just to compose herself, nodding slightly. Of course they had made it. Iwao had said that Yamada had survived the blast; he wouldn't have let anything happen.

Well, certainly not twice, her treacherous mind pointed out.

'Ichitaka is dead.'

Raiku's eyes flew open at the news, fixing on Gaara. He looked completely unaffected. 'The… explosion,' she said slowly.

Gaara didn't respond, but she now took his silences as confirmation and sagged back into her pillows.

She knew intellectually that it was useless to feel guilt. Guilt was a valueless emotion at any time, even when it seemed so justified. She hadn't done anything deliberately, but that hadn't changed the fact that she had done it. She remembered Ichitaka's smile, the one and only time she had ever seen it and now, the only time she ever would. Her gut twisted.

To distract herself, Raiku found her hands reaching for the water again.

Gaara's gaze flicked over to it, then back to her.

Her guilt morphed into anger in a flash. 'Do you have to be so mean all the time!?' she demanded, wishing she could take the words back even as she said them.

Gaara's eyes narrowed. A distinctly murderous air started to fill the room; the silence became heavy and unpleasant.

Raiku shrank back immediately. 'Sorry.'

The smothering silence continued until she felt brave enough to ask the question she had wanted to from the beginning, unable to meet his gaze for more than a glance each time she tried. She settled for looking at the floor, the wall, the window- anything else. 'Why… haven't they come to see me?'

Gaara tilted his head. Folded his arms. 'Why would they?'

Well.

Well then.

Raiku wasn't sure how to take that. Was it an insult? Was it a snide commentary on her status or theirs? Did he not know? Had he-

Ah.

'You're supposed to visit each other in hospital,' Raiku muttered, twisting the sheet between her bandaged fingers and feeling the painful tug and stretch of her burnt palm. 'It's what friends do.'

Gaara blinked, slowly. Just once.

He'd never been in hospital, of course. She couldn't expect him to know these things, at least not in a non-intellectual way.

Wait.

'Not that I'm trying to tell you what to do about friends,' she forced out as quickly as possible, which was not particularly fast when she was under the influence. She could still hear herself slurring a little, but she now only took a second to refocus her eyes whenever she blinked, which was a vast improvement from her state hours before. 'Every friend is different.'

The silence stretched on.

Raiku eyed the water pitifully and found her salvation when a nurse knocked on the doorframe tentatively. Her hope was short-lived, however, when the woman seemed white and jittery and gave that entire section of the room a wide berth when she hurried over to check Raiku's chart.

Of course. Gaara was terrifying.

But what she saw there gave her pause. '…You scored only four out of twenty on your checklist,' the woman mumbled to herself with a frown.

Raiku creased her eyes in awkward apology. 'It… Kankuro,' she said by way of explanation. Worryingly, this seemed to be sufficient. The nurse tore the page off and grabbed a new one from the folder at the end of the bed.

Raiku was way ahead of her. 'Gairano Raiku, female, thirteen, Konoha-,'

The nurse waved her off. 'I get it, I get it.'

With supreme reluctance, the woman went to the side of her bed opposite from Gaara, carefully avoiding looking at him, and pressed her fingers to Raiku's wrist to check her pulse.

While the nurse checked her vitals, Raiku tried to make it clear that she desperately wanted more water. The nurse, in a display of staggering denial, pretended Raiku's flailing and gesturing and outright requests weren't happening until Raiku just let her hands flop back to her sides and watched her with resentment.

'If you're able to drop your technique, we can reattach the monitors,' the nurse told her, after jotting down some observations, her blue eyes only briefly looking at Raiku before she plastered them back to the paper.

Raiku smiled helplessly. 'Can't.' She didn't even have to think up a reason - she was that prepared. 'Too tired.'

The nurse seemed to accept that, but from the slight pursing of her lips, she didn't like it very much. She reached for one of the boxes on a nearby cabinet and pulled two gloves free, snapping them on.

Raiku tensed. She hated that sound.

Here, however, the nurse faced a dilemma. Raiku was injured on her left side.

Which was within a few feet of where Gaara was sitting.

Raiku watched with fascination as a sweat actually broke out on the poor woman's forehead. She took mercy on her, knowing that unless Gaara moved, the nurse would actually chicken out and leave Raiku without checking on her injury or, more worryingly, giving her any more painkillers. And then Raiku still wouldn't be allowed to go back to sleep. 'Could…' she winced. 'Could you… make some room for her … to …' She trailed off, too intimidated to continue.

After a long, ominous moment, Gaara shifted out of his chair and stood closer to the door. Simultaneously helping the nurse reach Raiku, while making damn sure the woman couldn't escape. This seemed to only make the nurse more anxious but to her credit, she did make her way around to Raiku's side.

Back in her element, she seemed to gain confidence, happily bullying the exhausted and sore Raiku into a sitting position and then lifting up her shirt. Raiku responded to this less than gracefully, namely by squeaking and flapping her arm at Gaara to make sure he didn't look. He did not seem amused by it, glaring out the window.

Raiku avoided looking at the injury herself. Her mind may have been having trouble keeping her eyes focused and her speech understandable, but it had no problem summoning the vivid memory of her nausea to the forefront of her consciousness.

She only felt comfortable with looking at the woman when fresh bandages had been almost completely applied and the wound wasn't visible. 'S'okay?' she asked hopefully.

The nurse seemed pleased for the first time since she'd entered. 'You seem to have a resting heart-rate of a hundred and thirty and you're still dangerously dehydrated after two liters of fluids, but yes.' She delivered this mixture of mostly bad and some good news with a satisfied smile. 'Absolutely no sign of infection. Which, honestly - I would have expected you to be in stage two sepsis after the way you came in.'

Raiku let out a high, nervous laugh and didn't trust herself to try and give an excuse. The nurse didn't seem to require one and sat on the bed to carefully unwrap the bandages on her fingers, pulling the packet of fresh bandages up to rest beside her.  **  
**

She seemed to get irritated when Raiku kept twitching away, but she honestly couldn't help it. Her hand hurt and the gloves felt strange against her skin. In an effort not to annoy her anymore, Raiku looked up at Gaara and creased her eyes in a smile. 'So I can go soon!'

'Your team leaves in a few days,' he told her, which popped the tiny bubble of happiness she'd worked so hard on.

'What!?'

'Stop moving!'

'Sorry, sorry,' Raiku said hastily. 'But - what?'

Gaara looked back out the window unhelpfully. Raiku had never felt a stronger urge to smack someone right in the mouth, mostly because she had always been scared that they might hit her back.

Well. She had often felt the urge to just grab Ryuu by the ears and shake him, but that was different. His threats were usually empty. An easy, sixty, seventy percent of the time. Or maybe fifty, but she was getting distracted again.

'Do they even know I'm here!?' she persisted.

Gaara shrugged.

'Ooh,' she hissed. 'The family reseb- family resemblem-  _family. resemblance_ ,' she forced out carefully. 'Is  _so obvious_.'

Gaara's head whipped around to look at her. The nurse tensed for flight and almost vaulted over the bed under the flimsy pretense of getting a new fluids and med bag for Raiku's IV. 'Well, time to get some rest, I know how tired you are,' the woman babbled in terror, hands shaking as she hooked it up and traded the lines. Raiku kept her completely underwhelming glare on Gaara even as the darkness crept up the sides of her vision, before dragging her down completely.

She didn't even have enough time to wonder how Gaara would choose to kill her in her sleep.

 

 

 

Her dreams did not comfort her.

Raiku's mind conjured rapid-fire flickers of light and red and dark and  _pain_  and faces too quickly for her to recognize, made her body tingle from a warning low-grade current of confused alarm and then- **  
**

Metal.

The feel of it brought her mind to a harsh focus and she could taste it in the back of her throat when she inhaled. Impossibly asleep but still physically present, she breathed in the feeling and felt herself calm down through agonizing minutes. The tempo of her mind slowed to a more bearable speed, flickers of sensation penetrating her awareness, but not disturbing it. **  
**

After a while, it lulled her back into the dark.

 

 

 

'Hey, toaster.'

No. She wasn't ready to wake up.

'Toaster. I know you can hear me.'

Raiku stirred uncomfortably, her hearing unhelpfully unaffected by her drowsiness.

'She seems worn out, just let her stay asleep! God, you are  _such_  a dick.'

'She's been asleep for days!'

'And we've only been waiting for ten minutes!'

'Exactly. We can never get those ten minutes back. Toaster!'

Raiku smacked at the hand that shook her shoulder, but it connected with all the force of a kitten. A drug-addled, dehydrated kitten. **  
**

'Aw, she wants to hold your hand. How cute.'

'She's trying to hit me, you stupid - Raiku, just open your eyes already.'

Raiku tried to comply and found only one of her eyes responding at first, the other remaining shut.

Daisukenojo peered at her, looking irritatingly normal after their ordeal. 'What the hell?' he asked bluntly when the other eyelid slowly rose, but didn't quite make it all the way up. It left her looking and feeling lopsided, and he apparently felt that deserved comment.

Ryuu rolled his own, more symmetrical eyes, he too looking like he'd just rolled out of bed on an ordinary morning. Unlike Raiku, who had yet again been medically mummified. 'Go and get her something from the vending machines.'

'What? You do it; I'm not your lackey!'

'No, but your body's small enough to dispose of easily,' Ryuu shot back.

'Oho, you can come at me, man, I am so ready-,'

'-to meet your maker? How fatalistic, you may want to get help -  _on your way to the vending machines_.'

Raiku watched this back-and-forth with dazed attentiveness, eyes flicking to the other each time a verbal volley made contact.

The exchange was cut off by her stomach growling impatiently. This made the two of them stop and look back down at her.

She lifted her hand a little and gave the smallest of waves, looking uncertain.

Daisukenojo glowered at Ryuu even as he grabbed his small satchel from the table. 'This isn't over,' he said warningly, leaving the room.

This left her and Ryuu in silence.

Raiku stared at him, in a pleasant haze from the drugs and her gaze warm. Ryuu seemed to have trouble meeting it; uncharacteristically hesitant now that Daisukenojo wasn't there for him to bounce off.

'Ryuu,' she greeted.

He swallowed, almost imperceptibly. 'Raiku.'

She nodded for no real reason. Yes, that's me, her mind agreed dopily.

Silence again.

A dam seemed to break in Ryuu before long and his hands fisted in the sheet by her leg.

'I'm sorry.'

Raiku gawked at him, her head pressed further back into her pillow.

He flushed, aware of how strange it seemed coming from him. 'Don't make me say it again.'

'Can't believe y' said it at all,' Raiku slurred, eyes wide.

His lip curled a little to show a sliver of white; his teeth were almost grinding against each other. She couldn't tell if it was loathing for her or himself. Statistically speaking, it was probably her.  **  
**

'We didn't know you were here. We didn't know until this morning that you and Iwao had made it. We thought you'd ... with Ichitaka and Konishi in the fire. We left you there.'

After a beat, he spoke again with a knitted brow and intense gaze, directed more at his hands than her. 'I left you there,' he repeated uselessly, seeming more angry than upset. That was okay, though. That was reassuringly normal; he was like their own little fury-engine. He was visibly struggling with what he was trying to say, however, so she kept silent.  **  
**

Ryuu got his next sentence out as though trying to hurl the words as far from him as possible. 'I thought you'd died and you'd died thinking that that was what I wanted and it's not.' He swallowed again, the entire line of his body so tense, so angry.

Raiku blinked at him, parsing the sentence silently in her head until she thought she understood it.

Oh.

'I didn't,' she managed through the wave of realization.

Ryuu glowered at her, but couldn't maintain the eye contact for more than a second. Ashamed. 'Don't patronize me. I saw the look on your face in the forest, when he asked me to... You knew I would. You knew what I was going to do.'

She had known, but Ryuu didn't. He had no way of knowing that Raiku had understood that it was his Plot, the force of narrative causality making him feel that way; he had no way of knowing that she'd never been angry at him, that she had just been afraid.

But she couldn't explain that to him. He still felt that it had been his decision and in a way it had been - but it also wasn't, not really, and there was no way he could ever fully comprehend that.

'Ev'ryone makes mistakes,' she told him, hoping it got her message across. When he finally, finally looked at her, she smiled at him warmly. She felt his grip tighten in a spasm and reached down, lightly patting his hand until it loosened. 'I make 'em all the time,' she added cheerfully. 'I know you don't mean to.'

Ryuu's shoulders seemed to relax slightly, a tension leaving them that she hadn't been aware of, a slightly shaky breath escaping him. 'I thought you had died,' he said so quietly she almost missed it, voice thick, jaw clenched immediately to keep any further words from getting out. Slowly, as though expecting her at any minute to take it back, to come to her senses and scream herself hoarse, he lifted his hand and touched the back of hers lightly. Just for a moment, just enough for him to try and communicate gratitude and relief in his own, emotionally stunted kind of way, before he placed it back on the bed. She deliberately didn't look at his face, knowing that even if any of what he was feeling had made it on to his features, he wouldn't want her to see.

She tried her best to make him feel more at ease, uncomfortable with seeing Ryuu experiencing any kind of emotion in front of her. 'Who told you I was here?' she asked, keeping her voice light.

Ryuu shook his head a little, as though he was trying to shrug off whatever emotional spell he'd fallen under. He cleared his throat before he spoke but his voice was still a little rough, which Raiku tried her best not to pay attention to. 'Gaara.'

Raiku boggled at him, which made him smirk slightly.

Still, her easy forgiveness for something that had obviously been eating at Ryuu left them in an emotionally charged silence until Daisukenojo returned. He picked up on it the second that he entered and understandably assumed that they'd fought, dropping his armful of snacks to the ground so that he could throw his hands up in the air.

'Can I not leave you two alone for two goddamn minutes!?'


	43. the googly-eyed fish of friendship

"Alright," Yamada said, hands on his hips and shoulders pulled back at the end of her bed. He loomed over her, his eyes black pits boring down from an impossible height. "We ready for this?"

In his shadow cast on her bed, Raiku cowered slightly, her own eyes wide and glowing plaintively, even if her pupils were a little mismatched because of the meds. She couldn't handle conflict like this, so soon! She had only just mastered walking to the bathroom without throwing up! And the bathroom was  _attached to her room!_

'Yep,' Daisukenojo said grimly from Yamada's left, his much less impressive arms crossed over his chest and his expression unusually foreboding.

'I didn't mean to blow everything up!' Raiku whimpered, drawing her blanket up to her chest.

Ryuu's glare intensified from Yamada's right. 'Be quiet.'

Raiku fell silent, her gaze flicking from face to face in an attempt to read any of their intentions. She'd only been awake for two days! How was  _this_  the reunion she got with Yamada?!

They moved as one and she screwed her eyes shut. 'No-o!' she wailed, covering her head and making herself as small as possible.

When she wasn't eviscerated in the cheery morning light, she risked opening an eye.

Three objects were on the bed in front of her, in various stages of disarray. They looked… like…

Raiku almost sobbed with relief. 'You got me presents!' she squeaked, a hand pressed over her furiously beating heart. Three murderous glares bore into her. 'I mean… of  _course_  you got me presents!' she corrected hastily, unfolding herself and stretching her thin fingers out like questing spiders. 'That was always what I assumed because we are all very good teammates and friends!' she chuckled nervously, pulling one into her lap and toying with it without thinking. She was soaking it in, really, staring at them in deeply touched surprise. They had actually gotten her presents. On their own. Without being threatened, maybe. Before joining a genin team, it had never occurred to her that there were 'Sorry I Left You To Die' cards, or 'My Team Is Better Without You Having Been Murdered, Get Well Soon!' happy panda stickers,but they  _did_  live in shinobi-driven economies, so she really should have seen it coming. Ryuu's was in a shiny little bag, while Yamada's was in… some sort of sack. She was a little worried about it. However, Daisukenojo's, the one she'd reached for, was immaculately wrapped.

No, really, she was impressed. The ribbon was perfectly tied and she couldn't even make out the edges of the flower-printed paper, he'd overlapped it so neatly. When this earned him a few strange looks, he glowered at the bed and refused to blush. 'What?  _You_  wrap gifts for a bajillion people every year without getting good at it.'

'We didn't say anything-,'

'Yeah, well you think very loudly.' He huffed. 'Just open it!'

Raiku tilted it between her fingers. 'I… sort of don't want to, it's… so pretty,' she admitted sheepishly. When this made Daisukenojo growl low and continuously, she reluctantly pulled the ribbon off and felt for the seam.

After a few minutes of extremely careful unwrapping, Raiku stared at her hands.

'It's… a fish.'

It  _was_  a fish. It was a little orange glass carp with adorably unfocused eyes, slightly googly, and small enough to fit in her palm and curve gracefully around the muscle of her thumb.

This got Daisukenojo two more sidelong looks. This time, he did blush. 'R-read the damn card!'

Raiku fished through the paper and read it aloud, the front emblazoned with a little ninja panda swathed in bandages and on implausible crutches. '"Dear Raiku-" oh, dear?' she repeated happily. '-even goldfish can…"' Her gaze flattened. '"Even goldfish can remember three seconds, so act more like them so you don't have to go to the hospital every  _two_ ".' Yamada laughed and Ryuu snickered, giving Daisukenojo a small fist bump.

She lowered the card to stare at him. 'Really?' she asked dryly. 'Really, Daisuke?'

He shrugged. 'It's a cute fish, though.'

She cracked and smiled slightly with her eyes. 'Yes,' she said with fond exasperation. 'It is a cute fish. Thanks, Daisukenojo.'

She gingerly placed the little fish on the bedside table, and turned it so that its googly glass face was looking in her direction as much as its googly face could, mostly so that Daisukenojo could get his bashful coughing and feelings dealt with and without feeling uncomfortably scrutinized. That done, she turned to the other two. **  
**

With an ominous air, she reached for the burlap sack from Yamada, who grinned at her from above. They'd exchanged exactly no words, directly. That said, she had gotten a little note saying 'You're alive! Good!' the day before, so she guessed he didn't want an emotional reunion and had chickened out.

She hadn't been eager for one either, so she'd let it go without comment. But he'd smiled at her, very briefly and for oncewithout sadistic glee, and she'd returned it. It was close enough.

She carefully peered inside the sack and blanched.

'These. Are. Apparently, uh, drugs?' she said, faltering, eyes flicking from the bag to him over and over.

'…Is that the wrong bag!?' Daisukenojo demanded, both her teammates rounding on their leader. 'Are you… are you a  _drug dealer_?!'

Yamada rolled his eyes and smacked them both swiftly upside the head. "They're  _soldier pills_ , morons!" He jerked his head towards the bag that Raiku now regarded with a great deal more interest. "Your body burns it up, you can give it back, get me?"

Raiku felt perilously close to having an emotional outburst. 'That's… that's really… This is really considerate. And generous, it must have been expensive,' she added, clutching the bag in a sudden fit of receiver's guilt. It was nowhere near full, in fact it was quite small, but since they were a controlled substance and she was a genin, it was about as much as she could resonably have. As well as that, she probably wouldn't need them often, it was a supply that would last a while if she used them wisely.

Yamada's deadpan gaze stayed firmly on her. "Not as expensive as replacing a forest."

She winced. 'Point… point taken.' She put the bag by the goldfish, making sure there was no card (there wasn't) before she reached for Ryuu's gift bag.

She turned the tiny card over. A ninja frog beamed up at her with a shuriken sticking out of its bandaged head. "Congrats on surviving!" it told her. She squinted at it for a moment.

Shinobi were so  _weird_.

But anyway. She reached inside and felt something pointy and oddly textured, eyebrows raised as she brought it out.

'A  _pinwheel_ ,' Daisukenojo said critically. 'You got her a  _pinwheel_.'

Ryuu shrugged carelessly. Yamada shook his head in despair at the terrible state of his two male genin, realizing that they were going to be both bachelors and his problem all their lives, but Raiku was smiling to herself. She tapped a corner gently and watched the pattern spiral out, delicate blue, white and black flowers on the reverse side creating a whirlwind of flora.

'Thank you, guys,' she said, interrupting Ryuu and Daisukenojo's bickering and smiling at all three of them. 'Really,' she added. 'It means a lot.'

They both looked away deliberately, hiding their embarrassment with varying degrees of success, while Yamada just patted her leg through the blanket in a gruff, oddly paternal manner. "No problem, Speedy."

He cleared his throat and resumed his normal stance. "If you keep getting better, we can go by the end of the week, if we take it slow. You'll have to get checked out when we get home, but you're not in such bad shape. Sound good?"

She nodded, tapping the pinwheel and sending it spinning again. 'Yeah. Sounds good,' she said softly.

 

 

 

 

 

It didn't occur to her, she would later be ashamed to admit, to ask the obvious. It wasn't until she was being carefully examined to monitor her progress that she broached the issue.

'Hey, where's Iwao?'

She had kind of expected him to visit her, but no one had even mentioned him. Except Gaara, who didn't count. And Ryuu, who didn't care.

Her idiocy didn't go unnoticed by her uncharitable teammate Daisukenojo, who was deeply fascinated by her medical treatment rather than concerned for her stability.

'You've been here almost a week, and awake for most of it. And you ask about him  _now_?'

She winced. 'I. Yes. Yes I am asking now.' She hissed when the medic prodded her injury, but it was a reassuringly expected pain, rather than the dizzying nausea of before.

Daisukenojo waved a hand. 'He was basically fine. Just worn out. One of the twins was put in here with some burns that they cleared up right away, but they have to find a new team leader. So they've been going through that whole process.'

She nodded, feeling a familiar flash of guilt. Ichitaka would be hard to replace, particularly after they'd had so long to get used to her. Because of Raiku's lack of control, they didn't have a choice. 'Process? Don't they just assign someone?'

He shook his head, watching the careful bandaging with avid interest. 'Not when the team is well-established. They've gotta find a fit, so they do all these tests to determine leader compatibility; we got turned away when we tried to see them before. I'm betting they won't be done for a while.'

'So, what - we just can't even say goodbye?' Raiku frowned, lowering her arm once the medic was finished applying a new bandage. 'But… he saved me.'

Daisukenojo seemed to experience a sudden surge of guilt, but it passed too quickly for her to tell. 'Yeah, well, you can write him a note or something.'

The nurse taking observations rolled her eyes at Raiku in a conspiratory, exasperated manner where Daisukenojo couldn't see her. Males, right?

Raiku creased her eyes in response, but Daisukenojo didn't seem to notice. Mostly because the diminutive medic that was examining her was also frowning to himself.

'Is… something wrong?' she asked, quickly glancing between the two of them.

After a moment, he jotted something down and stood. 'It's nothing,' he said, dismissing her sudden apprehension easily. 'You're just healing a bit slower than I'd like.'

'What? She heals like crazy,' Daisukenojo scoffed.

The medic shrugged, waving a hand. 'It's not uncommon. You were slightly malnourished already, plus severely dehydrated.' He gave her a quick smile and a pat on the shoulder. 'You'll be back to normal in no time. I'll get the doc to look in on you, just to be safe. Alright?'

Raiku tried smiling, but didn't feel particularly reassured and it must have fallen short, because Daisukenojo nudged her when the two others left. No sooner had the door clicked quietly shut than he was grinning. 'Hey,' he whispered, even though there was no one else to overhear. 'Wanna do something fun?'

Raiku eyed him skeptically. 'Something that we will  _both_  find fun?'

He pushed her shoulder lightly, careful not to jostle her injured side. 'Don't be a dumbass.'

Raiku watched him for a moment longer. Ryuu had had his little reunion with her that she could never talk or reminisce about or acknowledge in any way ever; not even when alone. Yamada had spent money and openly avoided emotional dialogue, which had implied that he had emotions to not want to talk about. She supposed it was Daisukenojo's turn. She just hadn't thought he'd want one.

'Okay,' she agreed with only a moderate amount of trepidation. Daisukenojo padded over to the door and opened it so that he could look down the hallway both ways, before closing it firmly and coming back to where she sat on the hospital bed. He gestured and she obligingly raised her arm, only to see him carefully remove the IV with a flash of chakra that sealed the tiny puncture.

Raiku jerked back, but he held her wrist firm. 'Daisuke-!'

He shushed her and glanced at the door. She had no idea why he was being so paranoid, but she was starting to tense up and get twitchy with the beginnings of adrenaline in response to his obvious signals.

Then he pulled her towards the window, and she kicked into flight mode. Usually it would be a choice between fight and flight, but really, who was she kidding?

'I can't leave!' she hissed. 'Especially not by the window!'

Daisukenojo snorted. 'Look, you wanted to go see your  _hero_ , so let's just go! We're shinobi; we're supposed to be stealthy.'

'Hero? I don't have a- ,' Raiku paused, which gave Daisukenojo enough time to slide the window open. 'Oh.'

She smiled, abruptly, and when Daisukenojo looked back, it was to the sight of her creased, grateful eyes. He immediately went red, which she found gratifying.

'Alright! You'll need to chakra-feet me,' she said, pulling her arm free so that she could rub her hands together and completely invent nonsensical verbs. 'And make sure I don't die.'

Daisukenojo rolled his eyes. It was something he did a lot in her presence. 'No kidding.' He waggled his fingers. 'I've been taking care of the brats for years. I can keep you going for an hour.'

Raiku fidgeted, torn between the desire to absolutely not go against the medics and smack him, and the urge to hug Daisukenojo until his veins popped. She braced a foot on the windowsill instead, foreign chakra attached, and carefully leaned forward.

After a minute or so of this, Daisukenojo seemed to get impatient and the foot still on the ground was abruptly lifted up, the world lurched with dizzying vertigo. Suddenly Sand loomed before her, then … the distant ground of Sand was directly in her line of vision. Raiku's feet stuck to the outside wall of the plain white building, but she still instinctively scrabbled at the rough surface with her fingers for a moment.

Daisukenojo nimbly vaulted out beside her, standing instead of crouching as some monochromatic gargoyle. 'Let's go. We can't be gone too long.'

Raiku cautiously edged her foot along from her crouch, standing with reluctance. Standing sideways felt weird. It felt like the world had rotated ninety degrees without asking permission. Daisukenojo seemed fine with it, the inconsiderate ass, and jumped from the wall to land on a telephone pole nearby.

Raiku followed, throwing out an arm to grab one of the sun-heated hooks just in case. Gallivanting around with chakra meant that 'down' became 'wherever your feet were' instead of 'the ground', and she struggled with it. She scurried up to perch on the top instead, keeping her left arm close to her side protectively. Daisukenojo crouched on the line next to her, scanning the city.

The Plot was still there. But, Raiku noticed with a grimace, it was partially transparent. Its shifting mass sliding over the sand-colored, squat buildings made the sight of Sand less inspiring than it was and … a little nauseating. And hypnotic, oddly.

Daisukenojo snapped her out of her daze by pointing across the heat-shimmering expanse to something on the edge, right near the high, earthen wall that curved around the town. 'I think those are the training grounds.'

Raiku squinted. It did seem slightly emptier than the other bits. But then again, everything was the same color. And also made of sand, which she found distasteful for a variety of pragmatic reasons.

'This village seems kind of like… a series of termite mounds,' she pointed out. The buildings were tall, but oddly bulbous, the tops mostly hemispherical with little caps on top and dark windows.

Daisukenojo snorted. 'Yeah, kinda does, doesn't it?' He jerked a thumb towards the presumed training grounds. 'That's where they'll be.'

Raiku looked wistfully back at her open window. The curtains shifted invitingly in the air current made by the air conditioner, while her clothes already clung uncomfortably to her skin in the smothering, intense heat. When her clothes clung, they clung everywhere. At least they were white.

Which… probably made her look like a giant albino stick insect.

Resigned to her fate, Raiku followed Daisukenojo across the rooftops between the hospital and the training grounds. Slowly. He was making little jumps and more jogged than ran, making it easy for her to keep up without making it patronizing. Another thing he'd probably picked up from all his little siblings.

Raiku drew even on the rounded earthen rooftop of a small house and fell into place beside him. 'Your ears got all freckly,' she pointed out, almost managing to flick one of them before he swatted at her.

'Shut up,' he grumbled. 'It's not funny.'

Raiku smiled at him. 'I think it's sweet! Not many people where we come from have them.'

Another eye roll. She was going to have to start counting them. But he was just so red! Everywhere! And then he blushed and just became one giant color swatch!

So maybe she was still a little drugged. She laughed to herself, feet weaving slightly on her route. She was used to it by now.

When they got within confirmation distance of the training grounds, they both crouched behind a chimneystack.

'Why do Sand houses even have chimneys?' Daisukenojo whispered, the two genin leaning out to study the area discreetly. As discreetly as one red and one white genin could.

'I don't know. It gets cold at night?' Raiku whispered back, trying to make out some of the fast-moving figures. 'Can you tell who it is?'

'Ryuu's there,' Daisukenojo came up with after a while. 'But he said he wanted to train against a Sand wind user, so he and Yamada set it up.'

'Seriously?' Raiku hissed. 'Do we really want him to be  _more_  dangerous?'

'Hell no, but -  _hide_!'

They both ducked out of sight for a moment, hearts thudding in their ears, before Daisukenojo perked his head up again.

He frowned. 'So, your friend is there and I think he's suspicious.'

Raiku shook her head. 'I keep telling you, Gaara is my friend  _by accident_  and does  _not_  count because he wants to  _murder me-,'_

Daisukenojo flapped a hand at her impatiently. 'Not him, I heard you the first thousand times. Purple paint guy.'

She paled even further, if that were possible. 'Kankuro!? Not him,' she groaned, letting her forehead hit the rough sandstone in front of her. 'He loves making things difficult. My life, specifically. Yours would just be a bonus.'

Daisukenojo frowned and sketched his finger in random shapes over the molded rooftop as though drawing out plans in his head. 'But you're still supposed to be in hospital. So if he catches us, you'll get dragged back and I'll get in trouble.'

Raiku nodded, pulling her shirt a little from her sweaty skin and fanning herself. 'Are we sure that Iwao's there?'

Daisukenojo tilted his hand like it was a scale. 'Sort of.'

'We shouldn't go to too much trouble for "sort of",' she criticised.

'I can sense the twins, but Iwao was a lot trickier to pick up during the trip. Even if he were there, I wouldn't be able to tell unless I got close.'

Raiku peered over again, a white tuft over the chimney. The distant figure of Kankuro didn't appear to be looking their way - his eerily purple countenance was facing a sparring match between a giant something-weapon-y-user and a less distinct person. Not Gaara, thankfully. On another field, two over, a few blurs darted back and forth while a line of more generically dressed Sand-nin observed.

She looked back at Daisukenojo. 'So, let's get closer and see if we can spot them.'

He grinned, eyebrows raised. 'You wanna try and sneak up there. Sneak up on Jounin?'

She waved her hand. 'Like they'll be paying attention anyway.'

'You are so drugged,' Daisukenojo said under his breath, but he seemed approving. He rubbed his hands together in ill-concealed glee. 'Okay. Okay okay okay. Gimme a second to mask my chakra.'

She nodded and took a moment to do her own - much easier for her than for her more chakra-enabled teammate. Regardless of how much she had, because it couldn't leave her body, it was extremely easy to contain. She also did a quick check of herself. In a bit of pain from her side and much less from her hand, but that was manageable. A little dizzy and slow on the uptake, feeling a tad sick. But, not really anything worse than she'd had before. She could manage.

Plus, this was kind of exciting! Usually she was far too lucid to be this reckless. Maybe this was why Naruto acted so crazy? It was great.

Daisukenojo shook her by the shoulder, forcing her to stop the high, continuous giggling sound she'd been unwittingly omitting that had apparently been unsettling him. He pointed to a row of buildings that wavered either in her unreliable vision or the heat waves visible through the air. 'If we circle around from the side, we can use the supply buildings as camouflage. Plus, if they sense us, they'll probably just think that we're genin up to something stupid.'

'Which we are.'

'Which we are,' he confirmed cheerfully. Raiku eyed him with something like revelation. He was having fun. By god, Daisukenojo had a personality outside of reacting to Ryuu. She'd heard the rumours, but - no, Raiku, that was mean.

They leapt to the top of a nearby building, landing in crouching positions and dropping down the side into the closest alley. Raiku landed with exaggerated care and followed Daisukenojo in a wobbly line. He stopped her when they had to cross a street, putting a hand out and almost catching her across the chest.

This close to the training grounds, the ones that were within the village at least, there wasn't much foot traffic. She felt a familiar tingle of energy and realized he was giving her a quick scan, the results of which must have been acceptable because he dropped the arm and padded across the road.

Raiku picked her way across the coarse road daintily, as the shoes she'd been given were thin-soled ones only intended for inside use. The streets were narrow and the buildings high, making the sun fall short of casting its fiery gaze on them as they weaved through thin alleyways in shadow. It gave Raiku a curious feeling of claustrophobia to make her way through abandoned alleys with high walls, the occasional telephone wire strung across high above. It built until she felt a palpable wave of relief wash over her when she was stopped yet again and felt chakra presences nearby, and heard the familiar sounds of combat filtering through the walls.

'Up or around?'

She had no idea. '...Around?' She offered uncertainly. Fortunately, that seemed to be right answer, based on Daisukenojo's nod.

'Good thinking. We can use the cover to duck behind the practice dummy shed to get a better look.'

'Exactly,' she said sagely, willing to pretend that had definitely been what she was thinking about instead of pondering the graffiti scribbled on the opposite wall. She had no idea what some of those words meant, which confused her. She was generally familiar with that sort of thing from Yamada or Daisukenojo's excitably crude younger brothers.

She circled around the base of an old-looking building with deep gouges littering its surface. Probably from weapons practices that spilled out off the fields, like in Konoha. As they both peered around the corner, their field of vision abruptly opened up in a way that somehow surprised her overheating, medicated mind.

Kankuro could be seen from behind some distance away, his stance oddly firm. It was the other girl, his teammate, who was fighting. Her enormous fan sliced through the air and sent gusts of wind so powerful that they could be actually be made out, distortions rocketing towards her opponent that ripped up the earth and then - stopped dead.

She couldn't see Ryuu, but she knew that technique, knew it intimately. The sight and thought of it provoked rapidfire flashes of unpleasant memories so she looked away. It was much easier to focus on the field closest to them, less frightening to focus on the line of Jounin arranged around it to watch the sparring.

'The twins and Konishi,' Daisukenojo confirmed, like that was necessary at this distance. An older Jounin with an almost entirely covered head was standing in the middle, arms crossed across his chest and feet set apart. It was reminiscent of Yamada, especially in the way he was instructing the two of them. They moved fluidly and in perfect sync, trading blows that never quite managed to connect. It was like a crane dance, almost, except...

Raiku squinted a bit and frowned to herself under her mask. Except for their faces, visible in flashes at such close range. She had no siblings, so she would have to ask Daisukenojo if she wanted to confirm, but surely twins shouldn't look so -

'I see him,' Daisukenojo hissed, tugging on her shirtsleeve and pointing.

She followed his finger and saw Iwao. And it was strange, to see Iwao again with his face-paint and his uniform, standing on the packed sand like he belonged there. For some reason it was hard for her to accept, as though he was some hallucination she'd dreamt up to keep her company and he didn't fit in with his physical surroundings. Or maybe it was the drugs, the drugs that had convinced her not long before that Daisukenojo's freckles were changing patterns on his face like clandestine red beetles.

But she was losing focus again.

How to get his attention? Iwao was watching the proceedings next to more Jounin that she didn't recognize, all of whom would undoubtedly see any signal they tried to send him.

She looked to Daisukenojo.

He appeared deep in thought. They both reflexively pressed themselves to the wall when someone looked over, then peered out again.

And cursed.

'Shit!' Daisukenojo hissed, pressed back behind the stone. 'Who stares at nothing for five whole minutes?!'

'Okay, okay, so he definitely saw us,' Raiku babbled, her heart pounding and side starting to throb. 'What do we do?!' The Jounin, a rather young man with long, pale hair had been looking right at them. There was no way he had not seen.

'Well. Well. Weird Jounin like you, historically, so you-'

'You cannot be serious you  _madman_ -,'

Daisukenojo shoved her hurriedly around the curve of the building. 'Move move move!'

Raiku hissed in discomfort but let him push her around to the other side of the building, where they waited with bated breath.

After long, agonizing minutes, Daisukenojo relaxed a bit. 'He's not moving from where he was.'

Raiku hugged her arm to her injured side and glared at him.

'Oh, come on. Jounin think you're hilarious,' he snorted, realizing after a moment what her issue was.

'They think making me  _uncomfortable_ is hilarious-,'

'And so does everyone else, because it is. You wanna see your friend or not?' He huffed, blowing his cheeks out a little bit. Right, she remembered. He was actually doing her a pretty big favor.

Raiku pouted, only because it couldn't be seen under the mask, like many of her secret facial expressions. But he was right and she needed him in case something went weird with her injuries or to stop her from walking into walls and getting lost. He turned and started climbing up the wall and after staring at it sadly, like it would help her out, Raiku reluctantly followed.

When they reached the top of the building, she risked another glance downward. The fight had stopped, but after a tense second she realized it was because the twins and the Jounin were being talked to by someone in the garb of an official. One was grimacing and the other was just staring coldly into space.

'Do you get the feeling that these guys are actually, y'know. A pretty strong team?' she whispered. This was a lot of trouble to go through for three genin.

Daisukenojo nodded, crouching at the closest safe distance. 'Yeah. Looking back, I guess Ichitaka was probably really strong if they were willing to send her to spy on Konoha.' Konoha had been considered the most powerful village for a long time. It made sense that Sand wouldn't risk some idiot, but it had never occurred to her that maybe the blonde and her team were… sort of a big deal. No one was as big a deal as Gaara and his team, but still. They were actually listening to the two Kano twins, and almost no one asked genin for their opinions.

'Wait. What the hell is Mr. Observant doing?' Daisukenojo frowned, subconsciously pressing closer to see the field better, but forcing Raiku to contort to make sure she didn't electrocute him.

'Daisuke. Daisuke?' she said nervously, her throbbing side starting to flare up as she twisted.

But he wasn't listening. 'Shit! Get down!'

Once again, she found herself pressed flat by reflex. It minimized the part of her that was visible, but she couldn't hide fully without Daisukenojo moving away and he hadn't realized.

The pale-haired Jounin was looking up at them again. Right at her. Right at the thin visible sliver of her face. Or, more likely, her hair. **  
**

She stared back, not sure what else to do and frozen in place.

Was he going to attack them? Expose them? Tell everyone they were -

He  _grinned_  at her.

Raiku boggled at him. He was  _blatantly_  amused by them and not even trying to hide where he was looking. He was openly facing their direction. He had  _dimples_. How old was he, anyway!? He looked way too young to be here!

Well, Ichitaka had been young too, an insidious voice reminded her before she desperately quashed it.

She looked at Iwao. This was evidently as close as she was getting. It looked like she wasn't going to get a chance to thank the short Sand-nin, standing and watching the field with his intense, serious stare.

The Jounin followed her gaze. Stupid Jounin, she grumbled internally.

'Wonder who their teacher'll be?' Daisukenojo mused, oblivious to Raiku's state.

'The blond,' she muttered sullenly, trying to sidle back behind cover awkwardly.

'What? No. He's too young,' he said derisively.

No, he was the most handsome candidate. The laws of the world's narrative bias had chosen him to be better looking than most other people, which, for a shinobi, meant that it wanted to do something with him. Plus, he had the only customized uniform and his hair classified as an unusual physical characteristic. Like Ichitaka, he stood out from the crowd, which meant that a) he had hidden depths, and b) he was the only one who could fill that narrative void.

And he was  _talking to Iwao_.

Raiku squeaked and then gasped for an entirely different reason as pain started making its presence known down her left side. It was too hot. It was sweltering and she'd been moving and judging by her increasing awareness of narrative, her drugs were wearing off. Daisukenojo hastily reached a hand over and skillfully evaded her attempt to push it away, placing it over her side. Instantly relieved, but still throbbing worryingly, her side felt cooler. But apparently, their time was running out.

Disappointed, she managed to push herself fully out of sight. 'I think we should go back,' she panted, half-slumped against the hot stone. Daisukenojo nodded grimly.

'You going to need help getting back?'

'Why are you out of the hospital?'

For once, it was Daisukenojo who almost screamed and Raiku who had to clap a gloved hand over his mouth. The shadow abruptly cast over them belonged to -

'Iwao!' she exclaimed as quietly as she could while Daisukenojo tried to pry her fingers off his face. Iwao was backlit by the sun and … in truth, did not look too pleased.

'You're hurt,' he said, as though she didn't know.

'You're okay!' she replied happily, but he didn't smile. Then she remembered where they were. 'Wait, get down before they see you!' A flicker of warm amusement passed across his face before a frown chased it off again, but he dropped into a crouch. 'Won't they wonder where you are?'

'Clone. You have to go back,' Iwao informed her, the painted yellow lines on his skin curving down with his disapproving face. But, she'd dragged and been dragged by him for almost a week, so she recognized his weird form of concern. Daisukenojo's struggles got a little more frantic.

'I wanted to say thank you! Before I left,' she explained, waving her free hand for no particular reason except excitement.

He nodded. 'Ah.'

Daisukenojo was, unnoticed, turning a funny shade of red, but even though he was much stronger than Raiku, he couldn't struggle much without being seen by the people on the training field and so his options were limited and she was surprisingly adept.

After a few seconds, Iwao spoke again, looking at the ground between his feet. '… Thank you as well.'

She beamed at him and nodded, the two sharing a moment of mutual gratitude before Daisukenojo finally managed to pry her hand off and gasped for air desperately.

Raiku gasped in horror. 'Oh god! I am so sorry!'

'You … bastard!' he wheezed, hand clutching at his chest while he tried to catch his breath.

'You should go back to hospital,' Iwao repeated, tugging on her shoe lightly to regain her attention. His expression was serious, yet again. 'You'll get in trouble. Or sick.'

She sighed. 'I will.'

Then she paused.

'Wait, how did you know we were up here?' she asked. Were they really that terrible at stealth? Probably, but it was still a little disheartening.

Iwao looked over her shoulder towards where the others were. '… Hijino told me. He saw you on the roof.'

'He what -  _Raiku_.'

'I am  _injured_ ,' she defended against Daisukenojo's glare. Iwao tugged again and she looked at him in surprise.

He jerked his head back towards the field. 'I have to go.'

She smiled again and patted his hand where it rested lightly on her heel. 'Okay. Thank you, Iwao.'

He looked away, red staining his face under the tan. '… No problem.'

He stood and disappeared in a flurry of sand, leaving them alone in the heat and the terrible brightness of the sun. They shared in the feeling of accomplishment for a while, feeling companionable after achieving their goal together.

'… I'm going to throw up now,' she said cheerfully after a period of comfortable silence.

Daisukenojo blanched. 'No, Raiku,  _no_ -!'


	44. recessive genes and penpals

'Blood type?' Raiku's poor doctor repeated for the  _n_ th time.

'O negative,' Raiku answered promptly, if a little wearily. Most Gairano were. Being universal donors was not only a convenient coincidence in general, but it also meant that they were the driving force behind the Konoha blood drive.

It fit. Recessive genes just…  _spoke_  to them.

She scratched a hand through her hair, slowly enough that it didn't generate audible sparks. She felt flat and tired, which was a disappointment after how much better she'd felt yesterday. But apparently her medic had been right to want her to get checked out.

Daisukenojo watched from her side with rapt attention at the exchange between Raiku and her put-upon doctor, who had been questioning her almost continuously since her blood tests had come back from the previous day. After they had immediately realized that she'd snuck out and basically barricaded her inside her room for the night, they had escaped with vials of her blood, like… pathology bandits.

Even though it meant he became privy to certain intimate details of Raiku's physical state and she disliked that on principle, she had to admit that Daisukenojo's curiosity was justified from a scientific standpoint. Raiku's condition made it exceptionally hard to treat deep wounds, even with the use of chakra healing. Which she had only just become aware of, but that she should have seen coming. Konoha medics were known for their proficiency in the extremely difficult art of chakra healing and also often specialized in treating shinobi with difficult bloodline limits, due to Tsunade's influence, but the same was not true of were extremely competent, of course, and Raiku would never,  _ever_  tell a nurse or medic that they weren't doing a good job, since her family had a high concentration of both and she was deeply frightened of their ability to make her death look like an accident. But she'd been told that while things weren't going badly, they also weren't going that well, even without any beginning signs of infection. It had apparently gotten to the point that it was decided that her treatment needed to be stepped up which was risky for Raiku at the best of times, since IVs alone were always touch-and-go.

Raiku was out of danger, Daisukenojo had explained after a long talk with the more accommodating nurses who weren't ignoring him for abducting her. But she would soon slide back into it if they couldn't feed and water her as rapidly as her body was demanding. In turn, her wound wasn't going to heal properly without the nutrients and care she needed, which her condition was making impossible.

It also created awkward questions.

'And remind me why you can't drop your technique,' the doctor gritted out.

'Because… I can't,' she hedged.

'But you know how to get around it already - you gave her a transfusion and everything when she arrived, didn't you? What else do you even need to do, here?' Daisukenojo frowned, absently keeping a bag of tiny chocolate taiyaki away from Raiku's questing fingers.

The doctor shook his head and flipped the page up on the clipboard to look at the chart. 'No.  _Because_  of her technique, we were forced to use plasma pills to make her body generate more on its own. We've been using work-arounds.'

Raiku shrugged. 'So why can't I just take more?'

'Because!' the doctor snapped, making her flinch back and cower slightly. He visibly calmed himself, but his eye still twitched slightly. 'Because,' he continued in tones of forced evenness. 'The human body can't just - look, plasma pills contain things like erythropoietin, which can cause  _strokes_  in large doses. They're only designed to keep someone from dropping dead from blood loss! We could risk it, but you're still dehydrated and malnourished, despite our best efforts, which I'd like to point out would have happened over a longer period than this,' he added, giving her a sharp look. This made her cower even more, which didn't seem to deter him as much the second time around.

It wasn't her choice or her fault, or even her father's - it was almost impossible to keep up with her body's demands now that she'd started hitting puberty, though the only sign so far had been that she'd grown even more, and only vertically rather than horizontally. Like a stretched piece of bubblegum. Suddenly, she had to eat twice as much, to both sustain her body's growth and to keep her ability stable. They hadn't worked out a proper system yet; it was a work in progress!

And after the explosion, she had just been so...

She was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she almost missed the next part.

'-the last thing we want is for you to contract an infection in your immune-compromised state and if we give you any more fluids without giving a transfusion, you're going to bleed  _pink_.'  _And then die_ , his gaze promised.  _Because I will kill you._

Raiku found herself being glared at and shrugged helplessly, throwing her hands up and shooting him her best pleading eyes.

The doctor's jaw clenched worryingly.

So that hadn't worked. Raiku found the effort of keeping her arms raised exhausting and dropped them to her lap, where she twisted her fingers together. She really didn't feel well, and she knew he was right. She did need help. But she'd been seriously injured in the past - how hadn't this been addressed before now?

She stared at her hands, worrying. They'd never had trouble bringing her physically up to scratch before. The medic had said she would be fine. Getting nutrients intravenously was the most effective delivery system imaginable, so what was going on? And she'd had transfusions before. Hell, she had an IV in now, so that couldn't be it! So why…?

Why was she recovering so slowly? The medic had said it was to be expected, but suddenly it wasn't?

How could she get worse, when she had already reached safety?

'She has a fluids and nutrients IV in,' Daisukenojo pointed out with a frown. 'Plus medication. Why isn't that enough?'

The doctor's hands tightened on her chart. 'The problem isn't the IV  _or_  the meds, it's all the other-,' he broke off to take a deep breath and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ' _Okay_. You've had serious treatment before,' he began again, starting from square one for the millionth time that day.

'Yes.'

'And it went normally?'

'Yes?' Raiku offered uncertainly.

He tensed, then took another deep breath to make himself relax. 'Are you asking me, or telling me?'

'She was unconscious,' Daisukenojo interjected, starting to tense in response to the much older man, his protective big brother instincts starting to kick in now that Raiku was being interrogated by a stranger. Interrogated by a stranger after being thought dead and after a surprisingly touching bonding session, she amended, since she'd been interrogated plenty of times before without him batting an eyelid.

'Yeah,' Raiku added lamely, hand stretching out to the side. 'I was.'

'You still haven't said what the problem even  _is_ ,' Daisukenojo grumbled, moving his food out of her reach yet again. But, a suspicion was starting to gnaw at the back of Raiku's mind. Maybe something had been different? Didn't Ryuu say, the first time, that the medics had to treat her differently?

But he was the one who pointed it out, they hadn't said anything - there was no _reason_  to think that she couldn't recover under normal medical care! Was there?!

But if things continued this way, they said that she would start getting worse again. And what if she got into a bad state, like before? The last thing she needed was to blow up a hospital in Sand. Then Gaara would have to murder his way through to the front of the line to even get a  _chance_  to kill her.

Not that she thought he wouldn't do it - he did have first dibs. Well, after Ryuu and Daisukenojo. Possibly Yamada. Oh, she added, also Neji. Hinata. Iruka. Those Sound nin, if they'd lived. Ryuu's biological family. Her dad. Mura. Right, also Mayuko -  _okay it may have been time to re-examine some life choices._

'Well, what the hell do you plan on doing?' Daisukenojo was starting to get upset, though she'd proudly noted that he'd restrained it well until now. He'd been stressed, before, but hidden it with far more composure than he usually did. Raiku wasn't like a sister so much as she was like a pet insect that he'd had for a while and gotten ill-advisedly attached to, or maybe a hermit crab that bumped into the glass too often and whose idiocy made it endearing, but damnit, he was  _invested_.

"He's gonna release her into our custody so that we can take her home for specialist care," a deep, gravelly voice interrupted from the doorway.

She knew those quotation marks.

Raiku creased her eyes happily at the enormous figure of Yamada who had stooped to get his head in through the doorway, even as her doctor swelled in anger. 'Are you insane, she can't be dragged across international  _borders_ -,'

"Hey, Speedy," Yamada greeted, getting himself in awkwardly through an entrance too narrow for his frame. "Get up, Shorty, I get the chair."

Daisukenojo grumbled his way out of the wicker chair and onto the edge of her bed, pushing her legs a little to get her to shuffle them enough to make room. Yamada moved past the doctor, who was now realizing the full physical extent of the man he was arguing with, and sat on the uncomfortable chair by her bedside. It groaned alarmingly. It had not been built for this kind of pressure. Almost nothing was.

Raiku eyed it for a moment with concern, before Yamada forced her attention back on him by speaking. "Look," he said to the doctor, dark, flinty eyes stern under his non-existent eyebrows. "You can't fix her while she's got her killer jutsu up. She can't remove her jutsu without being able to focus. She can't focus when she's doped up on meds to the eyes or when she's in so much pain that she can't see straight. We don't have the technique with us to learn, so we gotta go back and get her family to take it off, get me? So we've gotta go now, while she's still doing well enough to travel."

'A member should come  _here_ ,' the doctor growled. She had to admire him. He really was determined to get her back to full health, and not many people would stick up to Yamada for the sake of a foreign Genin. He was wrong, but that was incidental. 'If she contracts an infection in the field, or god forbid, gets  _attacked_ -,'

'Hey! We can protect her!' Daisukenojo argued.

The doctor gave him the king of derisive looks. It was so perfectly crafted that Raiku, who examined facial expressions compulsively, actually got shivers. It spoke of years of practice dealing with shinobi. 'Oh, really? Then how did she get into this situation?'

Okay. He had them there.

Which, judging by the sudden waves of aggression exuding from her teammate and leader, was definitely not appreciated. Yamada's stony gaze would have physically broken a weaker man under its weight. "We leave tomorrow morning and you'll have her ready," he said in a low voice, not an ounce of compromise in him. "Get me?"

Raiku looked between them nervously. She actually was not entirely on board with this plan. It seemed to involve dragging her increasingly sickly body across large distances, which. Uh. Which was something she didn't like. But she couldn't argue with Yamada in front of his opposition in such a precarious situation, especially when the opposition was a foreign doctor. It would undermine his authority as a Konoha Jounin and a leader.

But Ryuu had said that the… man, his relative, had vanished. Which meant he was still alive. What if he took the opportunity to come back? And take Ryuu by force? She remembered the inky blackness of Plot crawling up Ryuu's side and shuddered. Or worse.

She cast an eye around for hers and it took a moment, but she caught sight of its mostly transparent mass puddled around the foot of the bed. It was getting harder to see. Which meant it was taking. The thought was nauseating, much like doing anything else, so she tried not to dwell on it.

The doctor left radiating displeasure and very nearly slammed the door shut, which gave Raiku the chance to voice her concerns.

'Yamada, I don't-,'

"I don't want to hear it, Speedy."

Or not.

She knotted her fingers together and shot Daisukenojo a pleading look. But he appeared to agree with this course of action, the freckle-faced defector.

Yamada took pity on her after a moment. "Speedy. You're not gonna get better here," he told her firmly, but not unkindly. "We gotta go back to where they know how to take care of you."

'But I haven't… before, it was… I'm sure it'll be fine if I…'

"Raiku." Yamada gave her a patronizing look. "Think very hard about your stay in hospital the last few times."

He'd used her real name. He must have been serious.

Unsure what he was referring to, Raiku scanned her memory. She didn't get it. It had seemed normal, except for her family smuggling in masks. She'd gotten antibiotics that she actually didn't need and lots of painkillers, been sedated, etcetera et-

She paused, a voice that sounded suspiciously like her own rising in the back of her head.

Previously, it pointed out in sly tones she was certain she'd never used in real life, she had always been hospitalized  _in Konoha_.

Of course.

And in Konoha, it continued, key emergency staff members  _were also Gairano clan members_.

She groaned aloud and earned a look of pride from Yamada as the realization struggled through the mire of her dehydrated, weakening mind to stand proudly at the forefront.

Of  _course_.

'You have got to be  _kidding_ me!'

'What? What the hell is going on?' Daisukenojo demanded. He was ignored. Yamada patted her shoulder and levered himself up with a grunt.

"Good work. We leave in the morning, get me? Come on, Shorty. We've gotta get extra supplies."

'What!? That doesn't make any sense either, we have more than enough-'

"No," Yamada said, giving Raiku a meaningful look. "We don't."

She grimaced. This was going to end badly. She waved at them as they left and tugged at her IV line a little. She was going to miss it so much. Still, she knew she had to get some rest if she was going to be ready for tomorrow, so she pulled her blankets up towards her and flicked the blinds shut.

In her peripheral vision, her Plot vanished a little more.

 

 

 

 

 

Shortly after dawn broke, casting Sand in warm orange light, a medic double-checked Raiku's strappings in the reception of the hospital with a displeased expression. Possibly because it was early in the morning, but more likely because she was leaving without it being approved by anyone.

'Are you ready?' Daisukenojo yawned, not awake enough to even bother covering his mouth. It earned him an irritated look from Ryuu, whose bedhead was a thing of beauty, but everyone knew that Ryuu was long-established as terrible. And also not a morning person, besides.

'No,' the medic growled, shooting him a hostile look.

'I think so?' Raiku offered, brow creased uncertainly. Only, not really, no. She was woozy and disoriented and felt oddly floaty because of the double-dose she'd been given. Daisukenojo had been given the rest of her supply, with strict instructions that he'd been told, then had written down for him, been forced to repeat and then told again. The staff had been very, very unhappy with the situation.

Yamada hadn't cared and didn't care now. He stretched his arms over his head, fingertips almost brushing the high ceiling, and made a satisfied sound. "Alright then! Time for us to go!"

The four of them made for the exit. Yamada had initially wanted to leave at night, so that it would be cooler. But after what had happened… he had apparently decided they needed visibility more than they needed to stay out of the heat.

Her doctor had disagreed most strenuously, she remembered with a grimace, already eyeing with resentment the nearing sliding doors that led outside. Oh god. She could almost feel the heat coming towards her. She didn't want to. Every step felt like it was taking her towards her doom.

She braced herself as Yamada led the way out into the -

'Gairano?' someone called. She almost fainted with relief and spun so fast that she almost threw up.

'Yes?' she asked brightly.

Only to yelp as the medic slapped a bandaid onto her face.

'There we go.'

She frowned at him, rubbing her forehead, and moved to leave again. Damn.

More slowly, begrudgingly, she turned back towards the doors. Everyone was out now. She had no excuse. She had to do it. This was getting too self-indulgent. The Plot was making her act emotional and whiny and it was going to  _stop_. Raiku gave herself a mental slap around the face and squared her shoulders. Okay. She could do this. She took another step and exited the hospital, exhaling heavily. Her sandals crunched a little on the rough road.

Right, that hadn't been so hard. Raiku smiled under her new but not particularly improved mask. She could be optimistic about this! She was going to be happy if it actually killed her. Which was almost a statistical certainty, but that was a risk she was willing to take.

'Hurry up!' Ryuu called from the end of the street, still mostly deserted at this time of day. Made of sand, too, which she wasn't going to miss! Things were looking up already. She nodded quickly and started forward.

'Gairano.'

She turned again with an exasperated look. 'Are you going to hit me again-'

Raiku paled and trailed off at Gaara's perpetually hostile stare.

Not the medic.

Raiku felt every muscle in her body try and tense up for fleeing, but knew she was more likely to run into a wall than to safety. 'Oh hey… there. Hi!' she said awkwardly, eyes darting to the left. They were still walking away, getting ever smaller. Why couldn't she have been placed onto a better team!?

The shorter shinobi stared at her, with his arms folded and green eyes almost as angry as his hair color. Which was pretty bad.

They stood for what felt like forever in a silence one part awkward, one part homicidal and a few thousand parts terrified.

'So. I… have to go,' she said hesitantly, jerking a thumb towards her team's retreating backs. 'But this has, um, been fun, though-,'

'I came to the hospital,' Gaara interrupted in a dark tone, eyes boring into her like an accusation.

Raiku restrained a flinch with what felt like herculean effort and hastily fashioned a reply. 'Yes, you absolutely did.' Tragically, it was not a good one.

Another silence.

Raiku was starting to sweat under his scrutiny. What was this for?! He'd tried to kill her in a hospital before, was this just a repeat? She was so not prepared for this, he'd just appeared out of nowhere! He didn't sleep; he could have come while she would have been unconscious! That would have been the most considerate thing to do, outside of not murdering her at all, which she accepted was probably not his first choice.

Gaara seemed to tense a little as the silence went on, which was actually a little unusual, since he was usually utterly relaxed. Physically, anyway. Probably because he had the comfort of being able to  _kill anybody ever_.

'You… came to the hospital,' she repeated, at a loss for what else to do.

She blinked.

_No._

'You came ... to the hospital,' she said in a slightly different voice, a giddy disbelief rising amidst her usual waves of horror. No. There was no way. It was  _impossible_.

'Oh my god!' Ryuu shouted, startling her into jumping. When she looked, he'd come halfway back down the street and had his hands cupped around his mouth. 'Put it in a letter, idiot! We've gotta go!'

Raiku looked back at Gaara quickly to see if he was offended, but he was… glaring at her again. Oh good. 'I. I will do that,' she said, desperate to find a way out of the situation but not entirely sure she understood what he'd meant enough to end the conversation correctly. 'I will. Um. Send a letter. To you,' she added, as though it wasn't obvious. 'Also Iwao, but I will write two. One will be to you but not to Kankuro, because he scares me.'  _Stop, Raiku, stop_ , she told herself firmly, knowing she looked like a babbling idiot but that it was particularly bad in this case.

Gaara said nothing, so she pressed on uncertainly, deciding to go for it.

'Because you… came to visit me?'

She hadn't meant to end on a rising intonation. That had been an accident that could cost her her life. She braced for some scathing response from the highly aggressive redhead, tempted to close her eyes. But nothing happened.

Gaara blinked slowly. 'Fine.'

Raiku almost fainted for the second time that day, blood rushing rapidly to her head from the shock. 'Oh good! Then I'm going to go this has been a good talk well-'

'RIGHT. NOW.'

'I'm coming! I'm going,' she added to Gaara, taking a step back and laughing nervously. 'Bye! Goodbye right now!'

She ran off in a crooked line, feet definitely not cooperating with her brain but still doing their best with the Escaping-From-Gaara agenda. She counted it a success when the sand beneath her feet didn't rise up to strangle her, drawing level with Ryuu's irritated expression in a few seconds. He snorted at her obvious lack of coordination, equally caused by drugs and her relief.

'Seriously, couldn't you have done that yesterday?'

She shrugged helplessly. Honestly, he knew it had been beyond her control.

Speaking of which…

Raiku could suddenly feel again through the adrenaline and became aware of a pressing matter.

'I'm hungry,' she told him with a pleading look.

She'd gone from one homicidal madman to another. He gave her a narrow stare.

'That's really unfortunate for you.'

'Ryuu!' she protested, taking a few quick, awkward steps to catch up when he turned on his heel and strode off towards the two others waiting for them. 'I have to keep my strength up! The doctor said so!'

'I'm not hearing this. You ate ten minutes ago!' he said, shaking his head and walking faster.

'Ryuu! Ryuu, you can't get rid of me that easily!'

But he definitely could. She was starting to fall behind a little, her wavering path not as fast as his direct one.

'Ryuu!'


	45. goal-oriented velociraptors and feelings

Daisukenojo shifted uncomfortably.

Conflict had been inevitable. After the trip there, they had been fools to think that their trip back would be uneventful. And now, Daisukenojo was the last holdout. It was a miracle it had taken them so long, until the last leg of their trip, but here it was. After days and days of boring, monotonous walking, it was finally happening. **  
**

This was it.

'I'm … not really … Look, this isn't okay,' he said after a moment, edging back from the fire pit and further into the dark. 'I don't…'

'Don't make eye contact,' Ryuu advised from beside him, looking uncharacteristically unsettled as well. 'And no sudden movements.'

'I don't feel safe. I think we should get Yamada back here-,'

'No!' Ryuu yanked Daisukenojo back down into the dirt when he tried to get up, not taking his eyes off the enemy. 'You're not leaving me here alone!'

'Well, what else can we do!?' Daisukenojo hissed.

Across the fire, orange light casting eerie shadows over her face, Raiku stared. To be specific, she stared hungrily at the packet of rations Daisukenojo was holding, poised like a ravenous wolf about to lunge. Daisukenojo made a tiny, high-pitched sound of discomfort, fidgeting unhappily in place. Ryuu elbowed him sharply, keeping Raiku firmly in his sights. 'Don't move. She's trying to make you nervous-,'

'It is definitely working!' Daisukenojo exclaimed and tried to stand again -

' _Don't move_!'

Daisukenojo froze. Raiku had shifted infinitesimally in response to his awkward half-step, eyes glowing malevolently.

'Is she… growling at me?'

Ryuu was perilously close to gaping and just shook his head. 'I...'

Daisukenojo snapped and hurled the food across to Raiku, who snatched it out of the air so quickly he couldn't follow the movement properly. 'You're on your own!' he yelped, turning on his heel and running out of the campsite and into the trees.

'Hatori! You get back here!' Ryuu shouted after him, unable to pursue lest Raiku take advantage of him turning his back.

Raiku, for her part, was deeply pleased. She finished opening the packet where Daisukenojo had failed from fear, inhaling the smell of the bare necessities of nutrients happily. She was hungry constantly now, and they had tried to limit her to only one and a half the normal amount of food. What  _was_  that? Who could even live on that? She munched happily on her ill-gotten sustenance, eyes creased with bliss.

'What the hell is wrong with you?'

Raiku looked up in surprise, mid-chew. She'd forgotten he was there. Ryuu was giving her a disturbed look that she hadn't noticed, as she'd actually entered a headspace in which nothing existed but potential fuel and he had no food that she wanted. Ryuu had used Daisukenojo as a sacrificial lamb so that he could surreptitiously eat his own supply without being attacked. She swallowed hastily. 'What?' she asked.

'You know damn well what,' Ryuu said in what she felt was an unnecessarily snarky manner. 'You've always eaten a lot. But now you want to eat all the time. What the hell?'

Raiku swallowed another bite and shrugged guiltily.

Oh good, he was glaring at her. At least it was familiar territory.

'I actually don't know!' she said defensively, clutching the ration pack like he was going to take it away from couldn't help it. All she wanted to do was eat, constantly. There was a grasping emptiness in her that she couldn't ignore, which felt less like it came from an empty stomach and more like it came from inside her bones. A low thrum of ... something. She could feel things at the back of her mind, conductors that tried to draw her more powerfully the hungrier she got, and constantly tried to find sustenance to hold it off but she was  _starving_. And it was only getting worse.

'You've been strange ever since ... what happened,' Ryuu persisted, refusing to budge.

Raiku stared at him for a while, deep in thought. Or possibly trying very hard not to ruin the mood by eating again, but it could just as easily have been thought. Ryuu didn't ask personal questions because Ryuu found the personal lives of others distasteful and completely insipid. But here it was, a personal question. Oh god, had their emotional interlude been the prologue to some sort of terrifying romance? No, no. That couldn't be it, or she would have seen her Plot include him. No, this had to be something else. Which could only mean -

'You feel responsible for me being like this,' she said with uncharacteristic accuracy and a narrowing of her eyes.

Ryuu almost choked on his water.

She grinned victoriously and reached for her food again. 'That's okay. This was always going to happen. Probably,' she added under her breath.

Ryuu glared. 'What?'

She shrugged. 'Well, I don't really understand all of … this.' She gestured to herself and then waved the same hand breezily. 'So, yeah.'

She started munching again, steadfastly ignoring how Ryuu was equipped with a lovely supply of metal that sang in a dark corner of her brain.

'… Raiku.'

She glanced up again. 'Yeah?' she asked around a mouthful of rations.

'You remember what happened, don't you?'

Yay. Her grace period was over and he was back to giving her that creepy, cat-like stare.

'I remember what?' she asked evasively. 'I remember, uh. You signing me up to be Gaara's penpal, is that what you mean?'

'No.'

'Oh. Um, you were sparring with Sand-nin? How did that go, anyway? I bet you-,'

Ryuu tossed a stick into the fire and the sudden sparks made her stop talking so that she could scoot back a few centimeters.

'Raiku,' he said, before she could get started again. '…Don't tell my parents.'

Raiku blinked, confused. 'What?'

He held his hands up to warm them near the flames, looking at them instead of her. 'They're civilians, so… they wouldn't have known. I don't want them to know,' he added quietly.

'Ryuu…' she started, but trailed off when she didn't know what to say. Oh god. She hadn't wanted to do this. She hadn't even had time to mention what had happened in the forest. Mostly because she had been deliberately avoiding it, hoping against hope that he would try to talk to Yamada or literally anybody else. But he hadn't, and so her hand was forced.  **  
**

She had to do it.

She had to talk to Ryuu about his feelings. She took a deep breath and tried again after a few moments of awkwardness and mentally grappling with the heinous act she was about to commit. 'Ryuu, you… about what happened-,'

'I already said I was sorry,' he said, cutting her off with irritation, but she shook her head.

'No, that's not - look, I just… I mean, you just found out that your family was a victim of gene theft.' And that was the reality of it. Ryuu had been stolen from a family that was almost gone, if the man was to be believed; he had been taken from his parents and raised in another village that had wanted what his DNA made him capable of. It was a common enough crime amongst shinobi - it was the basis for the Hyuuga branch seal, after all. But the thought that Konoha, their home, could do such a thing and then pretend that it had never happened… the thought that they could murder a whole family just to avoid being held accountable, it was…

How could Ryuu reconcile that idea with his memories, with his loyalty to his village? Raiku couldn't even imagine. She had struggled, in the past, with keeping her Gairano and her shinobi goals hand in hand, but this was something altogether different. For all her family's duplicity, they had always done it for Konoha. There had been no conflict there.

'My family lives in Konoha.' Ryuu said shortly. 'Those people aren't my family. I don't know them.'

Raiku watched him for a while, fingers itching to reach out for something. Not for Ryuu; she had never felt any particular urge to reach out for another human being. But something to burn and devour, to feed what was gnawing on her insides. 'I don't think they see it that way.' **  
**

'That's not my concern!' he snapped.

'Well, it could be, if they decide to come back for you and I'm pretty sure that guy's not going to give up-,'

'What, you think I'll pull an Uchiha and just go? Is that it?!' he demanded, growing icier and angrier with each word she spoke. **  
**

Raiku tried desperately for damage control. She hadn't been prepared for this kind of emotional confrontation. Usually she had to give herself pep talks and, and _research_  things. 'No, I would never think that!' Only yes, she absolutely thought that. He wouldn't have a choice if some Plot got a hold of him. Even worse, she wouldn't be able to perceive them as effectively while she was trapped in her own; it gave her narrative tunnel vision. She couldn't help him, couldn't even see it coming.

He saw right through it and leapt to his feet, rage practically crystallizing on his skin. 'I am  _nothing_  like him!' Raiku noticed the wind picking up a little and felt an answering thrum of energy stretching out from her bones towards her skin, tendrils expanding and seeking and warming her thin frame. She could feel it shifting and in turn making her shift in place, a build that was greedy for something and metalwater _power_ -

'The only reason I'm here is because some bastard decided that I was a commodity worth acquiring and that  _disgusts_  me,' Ryuu seethed. 'But there is nothing I can do about it and I refuse to … to  _punish_  the people in my life who were just unlucky enough to be there!'

He was panting slightly when he finished, breathing heavily from the force of his emotions and fists clenched by his side. Raiku stared at him in surprise, unable to believe that Ryuu had experienced two whole emotions in a month and that, in an even more horrifying turn, she'd been there to see them both. **  
**

'Okay,' she said helplessly, unable to think of anything else that wouldn't make the whole thing worse. 'Okay!'

'And another thing!'

Oh, he wasn't done.

'Where the hell do you get off, bringing up  _me_  being withholding when you won't even tell us what's going on with you?!' he demanded. Oddly, his anger made him seem both younger, because he was losing composure, and older, because he was also dangerously psychotic at the best of times. 'You've been acting strangely for months now-,'

'Hey, you've always thought I was strange!' she protested. And oh, that was a mistake. That was definitely a mistake, judging by the look he gave her. 'Ryuu, please,' she said, practically begging, practically crying with exhaustion and stress and a hunger killing her that she just couldn't sate. 'Please, I just want to go home and get better and I want to go to bed because talking about your feelings is really scary, okay? Please?'

Ryuu growled a little bit, but that was to be expected. She kept up her pleading stare, knowing that in this case, the glowing would contrast against how pale and sickly she was and actually help make her look pathetic and small.

True to form, his anger seemed to subside as quickly and photogenically as it had began. '…This isn't over,' he said, but she was already smiling at her tiny victory.

'No problem, we will definitely not fail to avoid discussing something that is unrelated to this,' she said happily, already unrolling her sleeping bag. Ryuu took a moment to parse through that convoluted knot of negatives, giving her the chance to get settled in before he could work it out.  **  
**

'Wait-,'

She yawned obnoxiously and rolled over, putting an immediately end to the conversation.

Sure, it was probably only staving off the inevitable, but tomorrow they would get back to Konoha. No more Sand, or sand for that matter, no more psychotic biological family members springing from the woodwork. Well, none but her own.

Everything would be okay.

 

 

 

 

 

Against all odds, and probably advisable narrative form, the last day of their journey passed uneventfully. They even made good time, and got there by early afternoon. It worried Raiku, like most things did, but she was also determinedly ignoring the fact that she could sense Konoha and Konoha's electrical network long before her chakra senses picked up their sentries, so she just added it to the list of things she was in denial about. The list was long, including items like 'how pretty Neji's eyelashes are' and 'I have a worrying lack of strong female role models'. She was pretty happy with it.

It was about the only thing she was happy with, since Daisukenojo had decided she wasn't fit to walk on their third break that day and she was draped over Yamada's back. Part of Yamada's back. Certainly what she had dubbed the Northern Yamada Territory. Well, part of that territory.

He seriously was the largest human she had ever seen.

She had taken to letting her arms dangle sadly over his shoulders while her masked face pressed with equal sadness against part of the back of his neck. He bore it with good humor, probably because her spindly limbs added negligible weight, and as well as that…

"Suzu!" he exclaimed happily the second Konoha came into view through the thick forestry. Raiku felt the vibrations of his voice all the way through to her spine and winced at the pain it caused her side. "Pick up the pace, you two!" he yelled back to the others, who were lagging behind so that Daisukenojo could keep an eye on Raiku and Ryuu could seize the opportunity to make fun of the redhead. He was like a particularly goal-oriented velociraptor, always ready to leap upon any weakness, Raiku thought fondly. Then she replayed what Yamada had said, like she always did to make sure he hadn't tricked her into doing something or threatened her.

'Wait, is she there?' she asked in alarm.

'No!' Daisukenojo called. 'I can't sense her, anyway.'

'Can she hide from chakra sensing?'

'Well, she is a civilian. It'd make sense that she'd blend into the crowd, I guess,' he admitted.

The idea caused all three Genin to shudder in horror, which Yamada generously decided to ignore.

'She could be anywhere,' Raiku whispered in horror with her cheek pressed against his flak vest, eyes wide and staring at nothing. ' _Anywhere_.'

Yamada took a deep breath than expanded his ribcage enough to actually move Raiku, which made her whinge in protest. He took the hint and didn't yell whatever he'd been planning to, but the abrupt exhalation made her continue cringing until he settled down. He waved instead, energetically. Raiku peered over his shoulder, craning her neck to see, and could vaguely make out a sentry on the high watchtower waving in return. She glared at them, deeply suspicious that it would be Kotetsu again and that he'd laugh at her, but as they got closer, she realised that it was someone she didn't recognize.

Well, thank god for small mercies. As they passed through the enormous gates, past the towering walls of Konoha's exterior, Raiku felt herself relax slightly. Finally, they were home. These were streets that she recognized, these were uniforms she could trust and the air even smelled comfortingly familiar. The pain down her left side and the ache inside seemed to lessen briefly under the sheer force of relief. The explosions and the fear seemed far away in the reassuring sunlight beaming down on her hometown.

It couldn't last.

'Hey, Yamada! What's wrong with your Genin?' someone called.

Raiku's eyes shot open.

"Izumo. Run ahead and tell the hospital that we're bringing her in, get me?" Yamada replied in that cheerful, slightly threatening way he had.

Damnit, it was Kotetsu's crony. The creepy, dark-eyed one with the bandanna. Whatsisname. Izumo,  _if that even was his real name_.

Okay, she admitted grudgingly. Maybe Daisukenojo was right about her being incapacitated, that hadn't made much sense. But hey, that wasn't so bad. At least he didn't know her directly.

They set off through the streets and Raiku closed her eyes again, feeling at peace at last. Not just because she could feel electricity in the lines of the village, a humming pressure against her skin that actually sort of made her teeth vibrate. Or feel like they were vibrating?

"What the hell are you giggling about, Speedy?" Yamada asked over his shoulder, past which she could see the doors of Konoha General getting ever closer.

Raiku immediately stopped. She was getting into the habit of laughing or giggling without realizing, it was… it wasn't a good thing. She was going to have to watch out for that. Only secret sadists and supervillains did that, or worst of all, obsessive young women. Anything but that.

The sounds of activity filtered through her fog-filled mind after she felt Yamada duck down to get through two large automatic doors, hit with a sudden wave of coolness from the air conditioners.

'Yamada - oh dear. Somebody get a chair!' a woman shouted.

Raiku blearily peered around when the earth moved, but quickly realized it was just Yamada shrugging her off into the waiting arms of a nearby medic, who cradled her carefully and waited for her transport to arrive.

'Oh hey,' she mumbled around a large yawn, doing her best to smile but abruptly turning it into a rabid hiss when someone tried to pull her arm away from her side. Somebody else tried to grab her wrist and she smacked them sharply away, growing immediately irate. 'Don't touch it! Daisuke, help me!' she whined.

'Hey, come on!' His freckled face appeared in her peripheral vision over the shoulder of the young man holding her up. 'This was the whole point of coming back!'

'But it hurts,' she complained. He was shoved out of the way by a far more familiar, uncompromising visage that she remembered glaring at her from across the dinner table. Raiku immediately started squirming. 'No, not Mayuko! Anyone but you! You know all my ways of getting out of things and I find that unfair!'

'Be quiet, Raiku,' Mayuko sighed. 'Give her to me, I can take it from here.'

'No need.'

A sudden hush fell over the emergency room, which made both Raiku and Mayuko cringe. Oh no. Someone with presence. This wasn't going to be good.

The owner of the low, commanding female voice revealed herself to be a pale yellow and green blur until she leaned over Raiku, who quailed back further into the medic who had a grip on her. A pair of amber eyes studied her critically, so Raiku tried very hard to focus on the little gem in the middle of the woman's pale forehead instead. 'You're the daughter of the Gairano Head, aren't you?'  **  
**

Sannin. Hokage. Tsunade.

Raiku stared, rendered mute by how intimidated she was but also not sure she understood the question. Her dad was the head of the family, but he wasn't the… Gairano Head, he didn't have an actual title. That was ridiculous. He was just a guy. He painted terribly in his free time. He watched ANBU Romance. How was he significant?

There was no mistaking their new Hokage, though. She was lovely, but in a distinctly… authoritative way, her pale blonde hair pulled back into two low ponytails and her entire expression informing Raiku that no, there was not going to be any messing around, or escaping, or pulling any Gairano bullshit. Her face was actually surprisingly fine featured, but combined with her unmistakable aura of power and command it still managed to tell her there would be no compromise today.

'Mayuko,' Raiku quavered. 'I changed my mind; I want you to look after me. Mayuko. Please Mayuko.'

Tsunade released Raiku from her terrifying gaze and looked at the man holding her, who looked more awestruck than anything. 'You have a room ready?'

'Y-Yes, Hokage!'

'Take her to it. I'll be there shortly.' She looked away, probably about to traumatize someone else. Or save their life, either way. Raiku was momentarily transfixed by the full sight of Tsunade; greatest kunoichi of her generation and probably every one before it. She was also surprisingly short, given her reputation. But she was so  _cool_  and in charge and … so totally about to ruin Raiku's life by finding out about all this  _oh god_.

'Hokage, excuse me!'

Raiku sweated anxiously and looked to Mayuko, who had addressed Tsunade directly.

Tsunade glanced over at the shorter, less statuesque and basically less-of-almost-everything Gairano. 'What is it?'

Mayuko bowed deeply under the bemused scrutiny of Yamada and the Hokage, two terrifying people. Raiku had to admire her composure. 'Please let Doctor Gairano and I look after Raiku. I've been taking care of her all her life, and she's both very scared of hospitals and extremely nervous around new people. Particularly women.'

Raiku was put into a wheelchair and almost in tears at this stage, so that hysteria probably supported that assertion. But her pathetic and weakened state seemed to have no effect on their new Hokage and top healer, because she just looked back at the file she'd been handed by another nurse.

'No. You can assist, but I'm taking lead,' she said, dismissing Mayuko's request without a second thought.

Mayuko winced and moved to Raiku's side to push the chair, so that she could stay with her en route to the room she'd probably be  _locked up in and experimented on for the rest of her life._

She felt light-headed. It was possible that she was hyperventilating.

'See you later, Toaster!' she heard Daisukenojo call. 'We'll come visit you soon!'

'Mayuko! Aunt Mayu!' She found herself being wheeled through the throng of waiting patients and busy nurses by her deft relative. Mayuko wasn't strictly her aunt, but their family was so convoluted that it was hard to keep them all straight. As a general rule of thumb, anyone older was an aunt or uncle, anyone younger got called a cousin. It was a working system but she had  _other things to worry about_. 'You have to help me!' she whispered.

'Raiku, I'm trying to think,' Mayuko gritted out, pushing the button for the elevator. 'Just… leave it to me, you're badly injured.' She spared her a quick glance before focusing on something else. 'I'll take care of you. So don't worry.'

'How did she even know it had happened!?' Raiku hissed.

'The person your teacher sent ahead, Izumo. He and his friend Kotetsu have basically been conscripted as her gatekeepers and assistants. He told her right away.'

'But why me?' Why the hell would the Hokage, the leader of their entire village, refuse to let them take care of their own? For what reason could she possibly want to interfere with a system that had been working since the Gairano had first figured out that people thought they were annoying and strange and would leave them to their own devices at a moment's notice!?

'She's made a point of meeting with all the clan heads and your father's turn was yesterday. She's building bridges, Raiku, it's not unusual.'

'We're not a clan! For exactly this reason!' This was something Raiku was struggling with. The Gairano weren't  _important_. That was the  _point_. People didn't make exceptions for them or go to special lengths; they didn't  _arrange to meet their family head_. They sent them invoices and shook their heads whenever the Gairano acted strange, which was infrequently, because most of the time they completely forgot about their existence and didn't even notice their weird behaviour! The Hokage didn't meet with them like they were Hyuuga or Nara, they ignored them! They certainly didn't offer them special medical treatment!

Tsunade had been out Konoha too long. She was going to ruin everything and Raiku was going to be in so much trouble.

Mayuko pushed the wheelchair into the elevator and hit the button to send it up.

'Wait! Aren't you coming with me?' Raiku asked desperately, about to jump out of the chair and away from the other medic in the little metal box to chase after her aunt, but the other Gairano just shook her head and took a few steps back.

'I'll come back, I swear, just trust me!' she hissed, her wide, worried eyes meeting Raiku's for just a moment before the doors closed, separating them from each other and leaving Raiku to stare in horror at the shiny metal surface and her own covered, terrified face.

The rest of her short trip passed her in a blur. She sat down heavily on the only bed in the room she'd been dragged to, hands gripping the edge so hard her knuckles went white and threatened to expel energy into the metal frame. The medic buzzed around, full of nervous energy that undoubtedly came from working directly with the Hokage, but Raiku was nauseated with fear.

What was she going to do?

She'd electrocuted doctors before, but this was the  _Hokage_. Plus, they couldn't pull any 'defensive techniques' bullshit with  _the_  Tsunade, greatest medic alive and strongest female shinobi ever! She'd see through it immediately.

Oh god.

Oh god.

Raiku's vision swam and she heard the medic call out her name as the world spun around her and filled with a low, warning crackling. She couldn't do this. She wasn't ready. She was in pain and disoriented and she wanted her dad to come and get her so that she could go home and sleep in her own bed and -

The door slammed shut. The medic had left. Raiku looked up at the window across the room longingly, at the leaves that swayed in the breeze outside, but she knew couldn't get out there. She hadn't even gotten back to the village under her own power. What chance did she have? She'd be dragged back right away.

She blinked back exhausted, hysterical tears and tried to think, but she just couldn't focus. She was in pain and she was thirsty and she was so hungry, like she was all the time now. But the hungrier she got the more the copper wiring through the walls hummed at the back of her brain, the more the electricity supplied to the hospital surged along like a second heartbeat that thrummed at the back of her eye sockets, down the base of her skull and through her ribcage. She couldn't concentrate, she couldn't  _think_.

Raiku found herself gasping for breath and not knowing why, trying desperately to fill lungs that felt like they just weren't getting anything and -

She curled in on herself and put her head between her knees, just about ready to pass out. She wasn't equipped for this. She strove to maintain an emotional balance that had left her completely unprepared for this kind of rollercoaster. Dark spots obscured her vision and nausea made bile rise at the back of her throat.

The door slid open and she couldn't bring herself to look up.

Footsteps.

'Raiku. Raiku, honey, calm down, it's only me.'

She almost fainted with relief at the sound of Mayuko's voice but didn't feel she could sit up without vomiting, so she stayed down.

A hand landed on her right shoulder and patted her reassuringly. 'I don't want you to worry,' Mayuko said slowly from above her. 'But you need to stop glowing before Tsunade gets here.'

Raiku took a deep breath, dragging her consciousness back from the walls and the nebulous mass that was the electricity all around them, feeling it as keenly and agonizingly as if she were pulling a tooth. As she did so, the crackling in the air and over her skin gradually subsided until she was just sitting and shaking, arms wrapped around herself.

She heard Mayuko swallow. 'Good.' She lifted her hand from Raiku's shoulder and moved a few steps away, rifling through a drawer. 'Let's get you into some patient clothing and get started. The more we get done, the less difficult this is going to be.'

Raiku stiffly and awkwardly started trading her own, slightly gross clothing for the plain white items that Mayuko handed her, the older woman politely averting her gaze in a deliberately obvious fashion so that Raiku wouldn't feel too exposed. When they were done, Raiku sagged back against the wall the bed was pushed against, feeling as though she'd run a marathon. Mayuko gave her a brief nod and exited, leaving her alone again, but she felt reassured by knowing that her relatives were nearby. As long as they were here, things were going to be okay. She told herself that over and over until the door opened again, and her walking nightmare stepped through.

Okay, it wasn't Naruto. That was unfair. But it was certainly  _a_  nightmare that entered the room, if not the worst one. Tsunade filled the room with her presence despite being of average height. She wasn't even particularly beautiful, though she was very attractive in an uncommon, idiosyncratic kind of way. Raiku steadfastly didn't look at her chest, made easier by her consuming, growing fear. But  _wow_. Even without looking directly, those were - Mayuko caught her gaze from behind Tsunade's elbow and raised her eyebrows. Raiku dropped her gaze immediately, knowing she'd been caught thinking about the Hokage's rack and that this would come up and embarrass her forever, just like the Neji thing.

'Raiku, yes?' Tsunade asked archly. Raiku snapped to attention and quietly squeaked from the agony this sent through her body.

'Yes, Hokage!' she managed to force out. 'I'm Raiku.'

Tsunade took the file that Mayuko handed her and stepped further into the room, allowing Yamada to get through the doorway and give Raiku a wide grin.

Despite knowing Yamada, this made her relax even further. Her aunt and her teacher were there. So maybe her tiny panic attack hadn't been warranted?

Tsunade flipped through the thin file quickly and spoke to Yamada. Interrogated, really, rapid-fire questions about the mission that covered the details he hadn't had time to put in any official report. This gave Mayuko the chance to slip past them and sit next to Raiku, putting a hand on one covered leg. 'Staying calm?' she asked quietly.

Raiku nodded. She was keeping a tentative grasp on her self-control. The day had started so well. They'd finally gotten home. For weeks it had been the same - each time she thought she was safe, that it was finally over, something happened that brought it all crashing down. Was this what it was like, having a Plot? It was exhausting, emotionally and physically. No wonder Plot-driven shinobi were so strong. Mayuko patted her quickly. 'Good girl,' she said quietly, so low that neither of the others could hear. 'We'll get through this.'

Ordinarily, Raiku didn't like Mayuko. But at this moment, she was like her own personal angel.

'So!' Tsunade was done with Yamada. Damnit, he was a failure at keeping that woman at bay. 'Let's have a look.' Raiku lifted her arm carefully and Tsunade abruptly pulled it further up to place a hand over the cloth on Raiku's hand. A faint green glow surrounded her fingers and the younger electrokinetic sighed with relief. The inflamed heat that had been rising from the injury gave way to a refreshing coolness while Tsunade concentrated, but it was a double-edged blade. Raiku found it harder to stay present and focused without that grounding pain. 'You got this during the fight?' Tsunade asked. Raiku nodded somewhat uncertainly, not sure what or how much Yamada had told her. Fortunately, the question seemed largely rhetorical, as Tsunade didn't appear to be listening. She let Raiku's arm down after a moment and stepped back, studying Raiku critically.

Raiku fidgeted in place in response.

'We can heal the injury, but I'm not letting you out of here while you've got a condition that's stopping you from healing. And since I can't see any reason for that to be happening, if there's anything you want to tell me, say it now,' Tsunade told her bluntly with her arms folded under her ribcage to accommodate her frankly astounding chest  _no stop staring at them Raiku, god so inappropriate_. 'I'm going to find out anyway.'

Raiku cast Yamada and Mayuko an agonized look of indecision. What was she supposed to do?!

'I… don't know?' she squeaked.

The look Tsunade was leveling at her seemed to strip Raiku bare. 'Of course not,' she said dryly.

So she hadn't even deigned to  _pretend_  to believe her. That was bad.

Tsunade narrowed her eyes. 'We'll heal your side and keep you for observation until you stabilize.'

Mayuko drew breath to speak.

'I don't want to hear it,' Tsunade said without even looking at the nurse. 'If your family has a problem with it, they can feel free to come and tell me why.'

Raiku stared. Tsunade was the worst nightmare of the Gairano family. She was the metaphorical torch that pointed directly at their dark little corner. A magnifying glass aimed right at the anthill of Gairano family life. She was ruining everything just by paying attention to them and she had no idea. What were they supposed to do? Raiku had no idea how to deal with this kind of attention. Her family wouldn't either.

This was not how things went!

'Take your shirt off and we can get started,' Tsunade said, snapping on a latex glove. Raiku panicked and shuffled back on the bed, starting to breathe heavily again, but Mayuko bravely put herself between the Hokage and her niece in a move that no other Gairano would have dared under any other circumstances.

'I'm sorry, ma'am, but she has a crippling fear of physical contact,' Mayuko said firmly. Tsunade looked unimpressed, but the younger woman continued on. 'If you initiate it, she's going to panic and hurt herself. It's noted  _many_  times in her file, by everyone who's ever cared for her. Not just the Gairano,' she added with a steely glint in her eye.

Raiku was going to write Mayuko a Thank You card made of  _solid gold_.

"It's true," Yamada rumbled, drawing Tsunade's attention. "She'll do anything to get away, get me? She's escaped from the hospital every time she's ever been in it."

Yamada would also get one, but made out of paper. He was still a bastard sometimes.

'You're just full of all kinds of anxiety, aren't you?' Tsunade asked Raiku with a raised eyebrow and a shrewd, skeptical glint in her eye. She was too smart. This was impossible. She was never going to buy any of their lies.

Raiku nodded weakly.

'Well, then this is going to take a while.'

Raiku shrunk in on herself like that would help and resisted the urge to chase the electrical currents out of the building.


	46. stares and checklists

The world hummed and Raiku listened carefully.

The electrical system of the Konoha hospital was large but antiquated in parts, evident from the weakness of the power running through those sections. The constant alternation of current was a rapid-fire motion that slowed the more it was examined, until it became a repetitive, consistent feeling, like the two-step beat of a heart, impossibly beating at fifty times per second. Over. And over. And over.

The sensation changed each time the electricity changed hands- from copper wiring, outdated now and damaged in places, to the newer conductors inside heart monitors and phone cables. And then, again, the alternation keeping pace and making time seem to slow until the world stood still, the power flowing at unthinkable speed.

Positive/negative.

Two monitors in the ICU that flickered briefly with a power surge, one ventilator, a metal mug at the nurse's station that vibrated slightly with the sudden spike in ambient energy-

Negative/positive.

Power bias in pediatrics, numerous devices running at full power and all beds hooked up, all lights on and heavy electric drag -

Positive/negative -

'Raiku?'

Raiku jolted violently awake and blinked, disoriented and found herself staring directly into a set of green eyes across the room.

Sakura smiled at her and waved from behind the elbow of Tsunade, who was eyeing Raiku with shrewd interest in the light cast by the -

Raiku looked at the window in a daze, not fully understanding what was going on. The light coming through was bright, but she had only just woken up? Had she overslept?

She looked down and found herself sitting up on the edge of the bed. Her side felt infinitely better, if still stiff and sore, and she was mercifully fully covered, but…

Tsunade cleared her throat and Raiku looked back at her immediately, still sitting in a way that minimized the parts of her that could be targeted. She raised her eyebrows expectantly and Raiku just blinked, unsure of what she wanted.

Sakura looked deliberately at the clipboard she was holding, and then back at Raiku.

'Do … you want me to ask again?' she asked tentatively, glancing at Tsunade for approval. She seemed unsure of herself, but that made sense, because what the hell was Sakura even doing in the hospital? Shouldn't she be out, uh, doing other things?

'Hello?' Raiku offered in an uncertain voice. 'It's good to see you again?'

A crease appeared in Sakura's forehead. 'Oh. It's, um, good to see you too, but I have to keep. Um.' She tapped the clipboard with her pen, giving Raiku a bemused look where Tsunade couldn't see her. Raiku returned it with a helpless twitch, not really sure why a pleasantry had prompted that confusion.

She desperately wracked her brain. Sakura had offered to ask again? Ask what again? When had she even gotten there? She had been asleep?

'Sorry.' She coughed a little to clear her throat. 'I'm a little nervous, so, please…? Again?'

Sakura nodded and spoke in a slower voice than usual. 'Have you been taking any medication since the commencement of or immediately prior to your mission?'

Raiku shook her head, fingers curling in the sheets by her side as if they could help get a better grip on her disoriented mind. 'No. I don't take anything, I never… I don't.'

Sakura ticked something off, and Raiku noted that it was over halfway down the page.

Had they skipped some? No, that wouldn't make any sense.

She had… been asleep?

Raiku tried to force her rising feeling of unease back down. She was exhausted and her condition was unstable. It would be the medication they had given her. Odds were that it was just messing with her head; she didn't exactly have a high tolerance. It had happened before. Probably.

'Um.'

She'd made a sound without realizing and found herself immediately the focus of both sets of eyes in the room. She went red under the mask and cleared her suddenly dry throat. 'I'm… hungry. If that's okay?' she added in a quieter voice, accompanied in stereo by the growling of her stomach.

Sakura smiled, thank god. 'Sure! As soon as we've finished the list, no problem.' She looked back down, reading off it more than she was addressing Raiku directly. 'Ha-ave you…' She paused and then went red. 'I think we can safely cross that off,' she muttered, but Tsunade folded her arms.

'It's important to be thorough,' she said, an edge of reproof in her voice as well as … something else…

Raiku squinted at her. Was she… was something  _funny_? That couldn't be anything good. It was almost imperceptible, the glint of smug mischief in her eye, but she had had a lot of practice from Yamada. Still, she had to be misreading it. This was serious.

'Have you recently engaged in any sexual activity?' Sakura said, blushing so hard the red crept down her neck and along her ears.

Raiku stared, certain she'd misheard. 'I'm sorry?'

'Have you recently engaged,' Sakura began again determinedly, looking everywhere but at the suddenly cognizant Raiku, who immediately cut her off.

'No! No! I haven't! Never!' she yelped, waving her hands in a negative gesture so violent that it almost threw her off the bed. 'No! Next question!'

'Right!' Sakura said quickly, still bright red but obviously relieved.

Tsunade was the devil. Though her face remained straight, it could be seen in her eyes. She found it so amusing to watch Raiku squirm. And squirm she did, rather magnificently, just a little electric worm on a … a something?

So her metaphors weren't up to scratch today. She sighed and looked at the ceiling, feeling oddly drained. She slept and she slept and ate  _constantly_  and she still felt …

'Raiku? Raiku!'

She snapped back to attention at Sakura's surprisingly authoritative tone, automatically paying attention to the person who seemed the most in charge.

Sakura looked back down at the clipboard with a sigh of her own before looking at Tsunade. 'Shishou, I think maybe we should feed her before we continue.'

Shishou? When the hell had Sakura become the student of their Hokage? Since when did she want to be a medic? Raiku was stunned, but couldn't help the odd feeling of déjà vu.

Had she heard this before?

Frowning to herself, she was too distracted to be intimidated by Tsunade's cool, assessing stare. 'Go get some, then.'

Sakura nodded and quickly shot Raiku an encouraging smile before she darted out of the room, hair bouncing with each step. Raiku was surprised she'd let it get that long; wasn't its length symbolic? Wasn't that her thing? Was it  _no longer_  her thing? She was getting behind on the character development of her peers; she would have to study up. Was there a cheat sheet that she could borrow? No, no, she'd have to make her own, like always. God, she never understood the changes these people went through, wasn't it exhausting, such inconstancy?

Tsunade's sleeveless grey kimono suddenly loomed before her and Raiku flinched back instinctively from the warmth of a hand on either side of her head, from the unsettling, contrasting feeling of coolness inside the front of her skull.

'Tell me - do you often lose time during a conversation?'

Raiku tried to cower without actually moving, because she got the impression that wouldn't go over very well. 'What do you mean?' she asked nervously, her brilliant gaze darting all over Tsunade's face in a futile attempt to read her. She'd heard Tsunade called the most beautiful kunoichi in the world, heard it several times in fact. Raiku's opinion from the previous day was unaltered by the second encounter; she agreed that yes, Tsunade was lovely, but she found the sharp glint in her eye and the older woman's enormous presence too frightening to be able to say for sure. She couldn't glean anything from her expression, even at this distance.

Tsunade's gaze was a little distant, as though focused on a point beyond Raiku's physical frame. 'Do you lose time at random points in the day?'

Raiku gave the tiniest of shrugs. 'I … I don't know,' she mumbled, unable to bear looking at the older woman any longer. 'I don't really notice.'

Tsunade made a noncommittal humming noise that could have meant anything, so Raiku dared to ask another question.

'…Why?'

Tsunade dropped her hands, absently flexing her fingers a little before setting them on her hips. She didn't step away. Raiku dearly wished that she would. 'Nothing yet.' She scanned her. 'Do you find it hard to gain weight?' she asked in clipped tones. Very professional. Very competent. Everything Raiku found both admirable and terrifying. Raiku honestly was no longer sure if she had an enormous crush on her or feared her. Wait, no, she definitely feared her. So, probably both. She could live with both.

'Impossible, yes,' Raiku answered after a moment of confusion.

Tsunade nodded to herself, giving Raiku another quick once-over. 'Interesting.'

The door slid open and Sakura poked her head in, a tray preceding the rest of her. Raiku beamed, instantly rendered ecstatic. 'Yay!' she chirped, hands stretching out even as the rest of her awkwardly contorted so that she didn't impinge upon Tsunade's personal space. Thankfully, she was rather flexible, since this left her in a sort of Z-shape that would have snapped a stiffer human being into thirds.

Sakura shook her head and huffed a little, but it seemed fond. Which, um. That was new. Though, Raiku had noticed that people seemed more affectionate when she was horribly injured, so she chalked it up to that and dismissed it in favor of making grabby-hands towards the food. It steamed invitingly. Sakura hadn't gotten it from the cart; she had obviously gone to the  _cafeteria_. She had  _paid money_.

'You're my favorite,' Raiku cooed, talking in equal parts to Sakura and the tray, but Tsunade soon put a stop to that.

'Right. This is good practice for you,' she said to Sakura over her shoulder. 'Her side is almost completely healed, so you have a chance to test what you've learned so far and finish it up.'

Raiku blanched. 'What?'

Sakura beamed. 'Really?'

Tsunade quirked a brow and that seemed to be answer enough, because Sakura immediately began to advance on the suddenly concerned Gairano. 'I don't remember agreeing to this!' Raiku exclaimed, edging back.

Her shoulder blades hit the wall. She looked back at it like it would disappear under scrutiny, before looking back at Sakura with dismay.

'Okay, so hold still,' Sakura instructed, already wearing a look of intense concentration.

Raiku was pressed against the wall with no way out. With nothing left to do, she whimpered and braced herself, trying hard to keep herself under as tight a lid as possible, trying to make sure that nothing of herself escaped into the air Tsunade was witness to. She forced herself to focus intently on her breathing to keep it even as Sakura neared, seeming to move in oddly slow motion. Raiku dragged what she could under the safe layer of her skin so that she could keep her secret for as long as possible, her breathing carefully in place.

Out. In.

( _negative)_ Out. ( _positive)_ In.

Out.

Out.

In?

Raiku inhaled sharply, lungs aching and heart racing in her ears at dangerous speed. She closed her eyes and put a hand on her chest to feel its comforting thud under her palm and tried to calm herself, still panting. To center herself, or to try to. 'Sorry!' she gasped out with her eyes still closed, dreading the look she would see on Tsunade's face. 'Sorry, I didn't… mean…to…'

She trailed off, breaths evening out but heart continuing to race for an entirely different reason.

The darkened room gave her no reply, obviously. The spotlight of Raiku's uncomprehending gaze moved from wall to window, from the floor to the bright slit where the door failed to completely obscure the light from the hallway in an otherwise completely dark space.

'Sakura?'

Raiku looked down at herself in her compulsive check, making sure she still had all her parts attached and covered even as a crawling sensation of panic started to take over what her confusion had started. In an attempt to keep calm, she took inventory. Her side didn't hurt at all but she was hungry, a sensation that was by now so familiar that it seemed to exist purely in her mind rather than in her stomach. Her hand, when she finally noticed, was gloved, rather than bandaged as she remembered it and she scrabbled at the cuff in a desperate attempt to confirm the truth of the matter. She managed to get it off after a few moments of audibly panicked pants in the darkness, the exposed skin immediately lighting up the otherwise black space with a faint glow when she exposed it to the air. It was completely healed, with nothing to show for her burns but pale, unmarked skin and her one and only freckle, sitting innocently and inexplicably on a ring finger that had never really seen the sun. Raiku tried to breathe in calmly through her nose and out through her mouth, but her chest ached from the effort of trying to stave off her inevitable hyperventilation and only served to make her feel claustrophobic inside her own skin, too full of a panic she was desperately trying to keep in.

She was constricted when she tried to move, which only made it worse, flashes of restraints and experiments flashing through her mind before she realized - there was only a blanket draped over her, tangled with her legs the way it usually was after she'd had more than a few hours sleep. Unable to stand it anyway, she struggled free and lurched across to the window, almost pressing her face to it in her haste to see outside.

Night.

The tree she remembered being outside her window must have been blocking most of the light coming from the streetlight and shopfronts outside, but there were orange and white flashes that lit up her face briefly as the branches swayed in a wind she could see, but not feel.

She rested her forehead against the glass but didn't dare close her eyes, staring blindly instead into the black as she tried to collect her abruptly scattered thoughts.

It had been a dream?

She almost snorted at the ridiculousness of it. Absolutely not. If anything it had been a nightmare.

Wait, a nightmare?

No. She'd definitely learned her lesson about assuming that. Besides, she could count on herself, on that disembodied sense she had gotten so used to so quickly, to tell her when she was awake. The metal window frame humming almost imperceptibly under her hands was real. The electricity in the walls, now a much fainter presence with most of the ward at rest, was real. The taste of copper was real, though when she probed her mouth with her tongue, she found she hadn't bitten herself and so had no idea where it came from.

Raiku felt a presence on her foot and didn't even need to look to know it was her Plot, making an appearance that was, by now, rare. It didn't help this time; it didn't comfort her to know that this was all part of some plan. She had been so afraid when she had thought she was going to die, and then again when she looked the reality of her ability and nature right in its unforgiving, terrible face. It had been a reassurance, then, that it was all to be expected. But in the dark, in the thick of it, it occurred to her for the first time that in a lifetime of trying to understand Plots, she had no idea what her own entailed.

What if this was part of it? What had Tsunade asked her - did she lose time?

How much had she already lost?

She had to know.

Seized by a sudden sense of urgency, she crossed the room and yanked open the door only to be momentarily blinded by the bright light of the hallway searing into her unprepared eyes. Covering them with her arm she made her way out anyway, colliding with the opposite wall and then keeping her free hand on it to trace her way towards the largest concentration of energy she could feel nearby.

After a few seconds of staggering she heard a male voice say her name but it felt fuzzy, almost as though it were happening far away rather than so close she could feel air displacing around the stranger as he moved. A female chimed in, higher and faster and Raiku pushed at the first hand that reached for her, surprised by her own weakness. 'How long have I been here?' she tried to demand, but her question came out small and plaintive instead.

'What?'

She dropped her arm enough to squint through the painful white light at a dark blur, features wavering in and out of focus where the person's face should have been. 'When did I get here?' she asked, and realized she was speaking far too loudly, as though over a noise that was no longer there, over the throbbing in her head.

'When  _did_  she-,'

'Day before last,' the man told her, slowly becoming more humanoid as her eyes finally got around to adjusting. It wasn't as bright as she had thought, just lit up by fluorescents bright enough to make everything clearly visible, but not glaring. He was holding her arms and she remembered trying to shove him, but she focused hard on his words.

Day before last.

She could have cried with relief and instead just sagged in place, which made the poor nurse's hands tighten on her to the point of bruising, but she could have kissed him.

Day before last.

She had lost the day, and that was all. Perfectly explicable, in a hospital. Perfectly explicable in the light of the nurse's station, instead of the more introspective dark of her room and solitude. 'What did you give me?' she asked, on the verge of breaking down. She couldn't handle this, the sudden terror and release, she needed to ground herself.

Comprehension seemed to dawn on him; his eyes softened with newfound understanding. 'You were sedated,' he said gently. 'It's normal to be disoriented.'

'I'll page the doctor,' the other nurse said somewhere behind them, but Raiku ignored her.

'It's normal?' she repeated, feeling her throat burn with tears she steadfastly refused to believe she was capable of.

He nodded. 'I promise.' He carefully traded grip on her arm to pull her up to stand under her own power, steadying her carefully. 'I'll take her back to her room,' Raiku heard him say over her head, and for once couldn't even bring herself to care that he was talking about her like she couldn't hear.

'Did Sakura come and see me?' she asked, so exhausted from her emotional ordeal that she felt herself losing focus again, but in the familiar, drowsy way that preceded sleep. She had to know.

'Saku- oh, Haruno?' He smiled down at her even as he carefully steered her back the way she'd came. 'Yes, she did. She's pretty good for a novice, isn't she?'

Raiku nodded to herself, practically collapsed onto a complete stranger and too tired to care.

'Oh, good,' she said to herself, almost giddy. Or maybe that was just light-headedness, but she'd take either one.

'And here we are,' she distantly heard him say and she looked up to see her room, her disheveled bed and it was so much smaller than it had seemed in the dark. She nodded and gave a crooked smile that he couldn't see, staggering through under her own power.

Sinking down onto the bed felt like a weight being lifted; she felt weak and shaky in the aftermath of the adrenaline, like she did after Yamada had demanded something more physically grueling than usual or a particularly powerful electrical surge. The nurse was still talking but she didn't listen, sluggishly and awkwardly pulling the covers back over herself, struggling back into a nest. He crossed the room and started pulling leads free from the monitor Mayuko had tucked into a corner, but Raiku batted at him unhappily when he tried to attach them. This earned her an exasperated look but she persisted, emitting a high whining sound until he finally backed off.

Raiku settled back and she was so tired, drained and she couldn't keep her thoughts in order under the persistent hum of energy around her, the power itching by inches under the sensitive skin of her fingertips, aching through her jaw and temples. The building's electricity was used differently at night and she drifted into it when she closed her eyes.

Not drifted.

She fell and the power was so  _fast-_

Negative/positive.

The sound of her heart in her ears seemed to slow down into an agonizing crawl, her every inhale and exhale taking an age and impossibly loud until her breath, her heart, was a dull roar of background noise she no longer noticed-

Positive/negative.

 

 

 

 

'I don't understand why she can't just go home, if her side is better,' Ryuu maintained stubbornly. Daisukenojo rolled his eyes and restrained the urge to try and wrap his hands around the idiot's neck, just like he'd been doing all the way to the hospital that morning.

'Because she's still  _sick_ ,' he gritted out, feeling a muscle in his jaw twitch.

The yellow-eyed demon snorted at him.  _Snorted_ , like  _he_  knew more about this sort of thing than Daisukenojo! Daisukenojo ground his teeth together a little bit, even though his dentist had told him he shouldn't do that any more. It was filing his teeth into sharp little edges, but hey - maybe he could bite his bastard teammate some day. Then it would come in handy.

Almost unwillingly, his mind lingered on the thought of his team, which he'd been trying to avoid for the three days since they had returned. Raiku was still in the hospital. Her side was better, as Ryuu had so helpfully observed, but for some reason, they still hadn't been allowed to see her. So, today, they would break in and see her anyway.

He sniggered to himself and stuck his hands in his pockets. Poor little thing. She was probably so scared of Tsunade. Her face must have been  _hilarious_.

It was an especially warm day in Konoha, even with the breeze, so it was a relief to step through the automatic doors into the air-conditioning of the hospital. Even if it was accompanied by the smell of disinfectant and less savory things, he was glad to get inside. Wind made him nervous, now; he didn't like the thought of Ryuu knowing what he was doing at any given time, even when Ryuu was right there to see it for himself. A lack of privacy was a terrible thing for someone his age. The lights flickered as the doors closed behind them, making Daisukenojo jump a little.

Ryuu shot him a narrow look. 'Yeah, real inconspicuous,' he muttered. Daisukenojo hated that he could feel a violent flush rising from his neck, but Ryuu just had this innate ability to get under people's skin and then  _itch,_  like a ... like a-

Ryuu jabbed him in the ribs. 'Stop trying to think of a comeback and concentrate.'

'What? It's not my fault the lights are bad!' Daisukenojo muttered.

'It's been happening a lot.'

Daisukenojo almost jumped out of his skin but managed to stay in place. Not just because Ryuu's hand had clamped down on his shoulder the second the woman had started speaking, he told himself sullenly. Because that would be stupid.

'Nurse Gairano,' Ryuu greeted over his head, because the inconsiderate jackass probably wouldn't ever stop growing, just out of spite.  _Like the world's most evil beanstalk_.

There.  _Nailed it_.

Daisukenojo's moment of smug and silent triumph at his perfect metaphor was interrupted by a belated surge of relief at the realization they'd been caught by a member of Raiku's family, who'd probably let it slide even if they did suspect what the two of them were up to. He turned to see the same nurse that they usually ended up talking to whenever Raiku was in hospital. Mariko? Masa-something... no, that was wrong. She had the same steady grey gaze as Raiku's dad, so it was probably her aunt.

'The power's been coming and going. After tonight, we'll be running on generators until the problem's fixed,' she told them, and Daisukenojo thought it was ridiculous that that bland, blank gaze should make him feel so intensely as though she was looking just past his skin. Raiku had the same thing - they knew when she looked at them; they could feel her bright blue gaze on them like a physical touch. It felt as though she saw right through people whenever she looked at them, something about the focus of her eyes just a little off, just a little too intently on something behind their faces on the rare occasion when she actually dared to look at someone for more than a few seconds. **  
**

God. The Gairano were weird as hell.

Ryuu nodded in understanding and his tight grip steered Daisukenojo away, digging in a little too tightly. Daisukenojo grimaced and cast out his senses, probing the field for the familiar, if faint, feeling of Raiku's chakra. It was hard to pick up at the best of times, but they had to make sure-

He stopped dead. 'She's not there!' he hissed to Ryuu, who responded by tightening his fingers in so much it would probably bruise.

'Where else would she be?!'

'She's probably off for tests or something, you asshole!' Daisukenojo said a little too loudly, making people across the crowded reception room turn to stare at them.

Ryuu immediately propelled him towards the doors, which opened with another flicker and a rush of the warm breeze. It smelled slightly like damp earth, like rain coming, and Daisukenojo had a moment to feel relieved at the thought of a break in the heat before he stumbled out into the humidity and sun under a heartbreakingly clear sky.

'What the hell!?' he exploded, rubbing his shoulder irritably.

Ryuu glowered at him and pushed him a little further away from the hospital. 'Nice work, genius! Now we have to wait, or find another way in!'

'Yeah, remind me why we can't just wait until we're allowed to see her!?' Daisukenojo demanded, feeling himself grow hotter from anger as well as the smothering heat of the sun.

'Because!'

'Because what!?'

'Because she could die!' Ryuu snapped, the force of it sending Daisukenojo back a step in surprise. Daisukenojo looked at Ryuu, stunned for a moment by the display of emotion on the taller boy's usually composed face, anger clear in his bright gaze. It made Daisukenojo reel, made him think about what he had tried so hard to put from his mind until now.

She could die, he thought with guilt. She  _could_. If the medics didn't find a way to help her, her side wouldn't matter. She'd just shut down, which seemed an impossible thought to him. Raiku was many things - wimpy, awkward, strange - but she was also happy and so undeniably alive that it seemed unthinkable that she could just... fade away into nothing. So he hadn't thought about it. But, he realized, looking at Ryuu drag his composure back together with deep breaths, that didn't mean Ryuu hadn't been. And he'd been strange about Raiku's health, this time; had been oddly quiet and guilty, which was ridiculous, because they would have told him if Ryuu had done something, right?

No, actually. Ryuu would want to hide it and Raiku never told anyone anything unless she was confirming what they already knew.

Daisukenojo sighed heavily, rubbing the back of his neck. 'Sorry.'

Ryuu glared at him but couldn't keep it up, instead choosing to look up at the sky. It smelled like rain and ozone, but there wasn't a cloud in sight, except for pale white wisps in the distance. There was nothing for him to focus on, so Daisukenojo kept talking.

'I'll keep trying, and when she's back, I'll come and get you.' It was as close to a peace offering as he would ever get and Ryuu flicked his fingers dismissively in his own equivalent.

'Fine.'

They nodded at each other but saw no reason to stick together for the rest of the day - it was too hot to train, too hot to fight, so they'd just tire each other out. Ryuu slouched away down the street that would take him home and Daisukenojo turned back to the hospital for one last look before he went back to help take care of his flu-ridden siblings. A flash of white caught his eye in a window in Raiku's ward - or what he thought was Raiku's ward, but it was gone too quickly for him to focus on. Just to make sure, he checked it once more and found only the varying strength of chakra from civilians and shinobi, nothing so distinctive as Raiku's strange, muffled chakra presence.

He looked back down to where he had to go and set off, trying to remember what his mother had wanted him to pick up from the store on the way home, trying to shake off that strange, familiar feeling, of someone looking through him.


	47. human eyes and anarchy

This wasn't over.

Ryuu knew he shouldn't be there. He knew that the hospital was now the province of the Hokage, but he also knew that something wasn't right and after half the night spent brooding about it, he wasn't willing to waste another second on it.

He silently leapt from the telephone wire to the top of the wall that surrounded the pediatric ward playground, landing lightly in the darkness. The moon had already set as it wasn't exactly a decent hour, and the night was a merciful coolness compared to the stark heat of the day. Perfect, in other words, when combined with the gentle wind that had started that morning, bringing much needed moisture to the dry heat. Ryuu took a moment to feel it with his eyes closed, letting the breeze brush along his skin and take his mind along the edge of the building with it, feeling the traps on windows and walls that protected the patients inside. It was no chakra sense; his wasn't as good as Hatori's and he knew that. But whatever it was, it was his and it worked, so it would do for now.

Ryuu jumped and let himself dissolve into the wind with a light exhale, collecting himself moments before the air connected with the building and landing on a spot free of traps. Security was tight right now, since they had recently undergone a massive invasion. This used to be much easier, he thought irritably, stepping up the wall with what Daisukenojo would have described as ballerina-like grace and probably some effeminate wiggling. That jackass-

Not the time.

This time was limited, and not meant for thinking of revenge for things Daisukenojo hadn't done yet. Ryuu reached the right floor but not the right side of the building; crouching and sliding the window open with care so that he could creep inside the darkened private room, thankfully empty of occupants. He paused with one foot pressed against the tiling, poised to flee if one of the medics approached. The air was still inside the hospital, largely, so he was forced to depend on his chakra rather than his more native he felt no response to his presence he trod noiselessly through the room, keeping the window open for a quick escape on a cross-breeze if he needed it.

He slipped out into the slightly dimmed hallway and assumed a posture of nonchalance, hands stuck in his pockets. He'd worn white deliberately, though he'd had to rummage for a good long while to find anything that wasn't in his three favorite colors and the two he'd picked to make his favorites less obvious. He'd look like an insomniac patient at a first glance and he'd be long gone before a second, with any luck. This was a hospital, after all, not a shinobi building. He should be fine.

Raiku's room was across the entire floor and in the opposite ward, but the night shift had a skeleton staff that just kept order on this floor, unlike the more intense wards, so Ryuu was able to drift in silence from the ward he had entered through to the next without interception. He kept a sense tied to the breeze he had let in through the window to make sure it stayed constant, using it to determine which hallways near his entrance remained clear and which he couldn't use again, all the while considering other things.

Like how stupid this was, he berated himself. There was no need for this. It wasn't as though Raiku hadn't been in hospital before and, honestly, she would be again. Her ability may have been powerful ( _maybe_ , he added grudgingly), but she was so bad at using it that she inevitably hurt herself. There was nothing to suggest that this time was any different-

No. Ryuu refused to lie to himself in that way. There were a few things, things that had made him suspicious from the start, and it was only natural that he would want to investigate them further. Ryuu hated lies, he hated doubts and refused to bear them when he could avoid it, and he  _would not_ lose any more sleep over some high-energy clown that he'd been saddled with some year or more ago.

He felt a familiar, low-key anger rise in him and felt comforted by its presence, using it to fuel to his determination to get to the bottom of this. He liked being angry. It was so much better than being bored, and he was so often bored. Maybe that was why he was here.

He didn't like the thought, but liked denial even less, so he allowed himself to consider it fairly.

And maybe it was better to be focused on and so frustrated by Raiku's constant elusiveness and her secrets, her half-truths, than bored by staring at his ceiling in the night and feeling the breaths of the people who he had always believed were his only family. Better than how he struggled to marry the idea of the parents he loved and the family he didn't know and how he couldn't  _stand_  it, couldn't bear the thought of being like Sasuke, and  _she_  was the only one who knew that. The only person who thought he was anyway and god, how Ryuu  _hated_  her when she looked at him like she knew something about him that he didn't. His hands curled into fists by his side at the thought and the surge of deep, abiding anger made his focus sharp and his mind work faster, dragging him to a conclusion he found unpleasant, but forced himself to look at anyway.

Maybe he liked being angry at Raiku more than he-

Not the time.

This was the time to be present, to concentrate on what he was doing. He almost shuddered but let the idea pass over him without rejecting it, settling unfinished somewhere in his mind where he could examine it more dispassionately later, along with so many things that he hated but that he knew could be true.

That done, he could focus again.

Still. This was stupid. Maybe Daisukenojo's belief that they should wait had been right-

Ryuu cut off the thought savagely and with no small amount of horror. Intolerable. Absolutely not. No way. There was no way he would ever even _think_  that.

He reached the right door and quietly pushed it open; checking to make sure it was clear before entering the hallway Raiku's room was connected to.

'Hey, you!'

Ryuu deliberately didn't slow and rounded a corner at the sound of a high female voice calling after him, quickly jamming a window open and disintegrating into the wind that brushed through and back the way he'd came. It gave him a chance to see who had been pursuing him, though his awareness wasn't up to par in this state. A dark-haired woman quickly made it to where he had been - he'd made it just in time. She looked around warily and stopped at the window to stick her head out, giving him ample time to ride the breeze away and to coalesce back into himself out of sight.

Well. That had been close. Ryuu shook off the physical confusion that apparently always accompanied the use of that very recently discovered technique and kept going, knowing that now someone had been roused, his chances of getting caught were greater.

Ah, and now another problem. Ryuu stopped in front of Raiku's door for a moment, facing his greatest challenge of the night.

What the hell was he supposed to say to her that wouldn't make it seem like he'd been worried?

Ryuu's lip curled at the thought of another  _deep and meaningful_ , of all things, with  _Raiku_ , of all people, but fate quickly made the choice for him when another nurse's chakra presence threatened to move into his visual range. He darted inside Raiku's room and shut the door as quietly as he could, his heart rate up despite his best efforts to remain unruffled. When the faintly visible lump on the bed didn't move, he took a moment to settle and compose himself.

Unaffected to his satisfaction, he crossed and hovered for a moment like he would never have done where someone else could see him, unsure of whether to sit down on the bed before he woke her up. No, too personal, he decided eventually, stretching out a hand to shake her shoulder lightly. 'Toaster,' he muttered, his voice sounding too loud in the otherwise quiet room, accompanied only by the sound of the wind outside. The unattached and dormant monitor in the corner flickered a little with life, but he paid it little mind. Electronics always behaved strangely around Raiku.

Though, Raiku herself was behaving strangely, not stirring at all.

Ryuu frowned and shook her a little more, until she made an unhappy, sleepy sound.

Stranger still. Usually, any presence near a sleeping Raiku would make her jerk awake at the slightest provocation, with a loud 'Aha!' for some reason. He'd never been clear on that, or on most of the things she did, even as her most closely held secrets were pulled from her tight, careful grasp and  _so help him_  he would leave that grip empty _-_

Not the time.

This time was growing short, and he had something to do. 'Toaster,' he repeated, feeling as though he must have done it a million times before, and that he was probably doomed to keep doing so forever. 'Wake up.'

She grumbled a little and he thought, for a moment, that he'd succeeded when she rolled over and fixed him with a hazy glowing gaze, something in him releasing a tension he had been unaware of. Only to regain it far stronger when she mumbled something, very much like his name, and moved to go back to sleep. Irritated now, he pulled her onto her back to make her look at him and glowered.

Usually this had the gratifyingly immediate effect of her utter terror, but this time she tried to reach for him - for his shoulder, or maybe his hand, but he couldn't tell because she didn't make contact, didn't even come close before she let her hand fall back to her chest.

Ryuu paused, something cold filtering in through his frustration. He gave a cautious shake again and Raiku's eyes drifted open to look somewhere in his direction, unfocused and glowing so brilliantly he could barely stand to look at them, far closer to white than her usual bright blue.

'Raiku?' he asked more quietly, trying to scan her face but unable to see it properly with her eyes creating such a stark contrast between their light and the dark of the rest of the room. She made an indistinct sound and Ryuu watched, blood running cold in his veins as her eyes flickered, like a broken television or a dying light bulb.

'R'yuu?' she mumbled, pressing the heel of one hand to her eye and rubbing it blearily.

Ryuu didn't feel relieved at her lucidity. He  _didn't_.

'Yeah, it's me,' he said, and he found that his irritated tone did not translate to such a quiet voice, but decided to press on anyway. He may as well. 'Do you have any idea-,'

Ryuu broke off when she fixed her eyes on him for just a second and focused  _hard_ , her struggle to do so obvious, and so obviously one she was failing at.

But then 'Ryuu,' she said with a sudden, startling clarity, looking through him and he wanted to  _shake_  her for whatever she thought she was seeing in him, instead of the him that was really there but then there was a flicker. And then the room went dark, the light flickering briefly overhead and the monitor giving a worrying flash, accompanied by the faint smell of burnt plastic.

Ryuu stifled the urge to pry her eyelids open manually and shook her again while his own eyes took a moment to adjust to the sudden darkness. She didn't respond to him at all this time. For a long while he was forced to wait, until finally he could see again.

He paused, tightening his grip on her shoulder. And it was nothing. It wasn't important, it would be the blanket between them and his own weariness, but he couldn't feel the faint thrum that always made his fingers itch and his bones ache slightly whenever he touched Raiku. Whenever he came into contact with her, no matter how many layers there were between them and he knew that this- this was something.

'Raiku?' he asked very quietly, hand on her still shoulder.

Raiku watched him blankly, evident from the faint glimmer of light reflecting in her eyes from under the door. But that was it. That was the only sign, the only indication he had that she was awake and seeing him; there was no light to blind him from her eyes, no stammered words to assure him that she was aware of his presence.

Ryuu tried to understand and tried to think of an explanation, but Raiku closed her darkened,  _human_  eyes and turned over without another word and he couldn't. He didn't understand. He couldn't explain.

He removed his hand and stepped back, unsure of what to do. Unsure of what he could do, but certain he had to do something, because who else knew? Their team, her family- nobody else, certainly not the Hokage, if he was any judge. Which he absolutely was. So he would have to talk to Yamada- no, perhaps not, he considered, following a logical process so that his conc-  _irritation_  wouldn't cloud his judgment. Yamada could be ordered to tell the Hokage what he knew if she thought he was involved, and he absolutely would do as she asked. Or even if he wouldn't, the risk of it was unacceptable. Who, then? Her family was secretive but harmless. Their assistance couldn't be counted on to be valuable, not really. They were mostly civilians, for god's sake.

That left him with very, very few options. He may have to… compromise.

Ryuu curled his lip with disgust and frustration, but he had to go. It was getting early rather than late, at this stage of the morning, and he had his best chance of escaping in the dark. He crossed and opened the window, refusing to look back at his teammate because he had work to do and she was causing so much goddamn trouble.

Again.

For him.

 _Again_.

'You're the worst,' he grumbled before he put a foot on the sill and propelled himself out.

 

 

 

 

 

'What do you mean, "normal"?' Daisukenojo asked, stabbing his dumpling with a chopstick gracelessly.

'Oh, I meant that she was fully recovered and we'd see her this afternoon-  _idiot_ , I meant what I said!' Ryuu snarled. 'And  _what I said_ was that her eyes weren't glowing anymore,' he finished curtly, gathering up a bite of noodles with considerably more grace. Yamada watched the exchange with his arms folded across his chest, and secretly glowed with pride. The little bastard had gotten in! To the hospital, while the Hokage was on shift! Not that he'd known that, or been willing to say how (for now), but still!

"You're sure-," he began, only for the insubordinate little wretch to  _interrupt him_. Like he was a  _person_. All his goodwill evaporated. He'd let this slide for too long. Something had to be done. Oh shit, he realised, the kid was answering.

'-ask me "am I sure"? Yes. Am I sure her eyes were open? Yes. Was it actually Raiku-  _of course I'm sure_ , I know what I saw!' he snapped.

Yamada briefly considered hurling him off the top of Hokage Mountain. That'd teach him a lesson. Knowing his luck, though, the surly teen would sprout wings or gliding membranes like a flying squirrel and then terrorize them all from above.

Well, damn, now he really wanted to try it.

'I actually wasn't going to tell  _you_ ,' Ryuu added, shooting Yamada a baleful, yellow glare. 'And then Hatori had to open his damn mouth-,'

'Hey!' Daisukenojo protested with a mouth full of dough, but Yamada overrode him.

"Oh, you weren't, were you!?" he demanded, pushing back from the table and almost upending the people seated behind him in the narrow restaurant. Ryuu didn't falter - he really had been too easy on them - and only stood himself, bristling.

'I wasn't! What happens if the Hokage asks you about it!?' the much younger male glared. 'Would you say no!?'

God damn but he was right. But Yamada couldn't let him realise that, because then there would be  _anarchy_. He glared and waited for Ryuu to look away first. Damn kids. They were like rabid wolves; every instance of eye contact was a challenge to his dominance. He had to be on constant alert for threats to his authority. Mostly from Ryuu, but Hatori was catching up. **  
**

Yamada settled back down when Ryuu broke his gaze and thought, letting the two of them keep eating as he considered their path of action.

He was right. Yamada couldn't defy the Hokage if she asked him about Raiku. He was lucky she hadn't already. She gave the Gairano too much credit when she assumed that they would have been able to keep that secret from her team; she was treating them like a clan, when everyone knew that the Gairano family really just stuck together out of some weirdo solidarity and their shared desire to mind their own business. But he could tell where the Hokage's mind had gone when they'd tried to keep Raiku's secret from her, and he didn't like what that meant. And now this, Ryuu's report that Raiku was being damaged, somehow, but her family standing by and not interfering…

It occurred to Yamada, as it had many times, based on his knowledge of her family and his interactions with her pleasant, but forgettable, father, that it would be a lot better for the Gairano if Raiku wasn't the way she was. Yamada was large, and he knew that that made a lot of people underestimate his intelligence, but he was more than smart enough to see the blindingly obvious - this was going to go badly if something wasn't done. Raiku was going to get caught in between her family's desire to hide and Tsunade's determination to dig them all up and it would all have been so stupidly avoidable if the Gairano could express themselves better or if Tsunade had stuck around for the last decade and seen that their family wasn't  _important_ , they didn't want or  _change_  things. She should have been dedicating her time to the more powerful clans, rather than the ones that didn't cooperate immediately. The bigger ones were too smart for that, but Yamada of all people understood the urge to swat the fly in front of you. **  
**

Damnit, though, she was _his_  fly. **  
**

Not for the first time, Yamada wished he could bring Suzuki into this. She could make it all very simple, just with a thought, but no. He'd promised her there'd be no more, and he had to stand by it.

So, their options. They had the three of them. And her father, he supposed, but Gairano was… he didn't want to say dangerous, because he didn't think any Gairano particularly was. Yamada was dangerous, Hatake was dangerous, and the Gairano Head was nothing on them. But that one Gairano was… unpredictable, inscrutable, impossible to understand. Yamada didn't want to involve him unless it was absolutely necessary. Who else? Who else knew? There was Konishi, but it wasn't worth dragging a Genin over the border. If he'd been a Chuunin or more, that would have been different, but it wasn't feasible. **  
**

Reluctantly, so reluctantly, Yamada turned his thoughts closer to home. The Hyuuga. He knew, but on the other hand, he very conspicuously didn't like Raiku, and his family could very well catch wind of it and use it to their advantage. The last thing they wanted was for the Gairano to get dragged further into the clan-Hokage war that happened _every_  time they changed leaders. But the Byakugan… there was a real advantage, there.

He waited for Daisukenojo to take another bite before he spoke again. "Hatori!" he barked and yes, he'd timed it perfectly. Daisukenojo choked and Yamada grinned. Even little victories were still victories. He quickly schooled his expression into something more fierce as the runt coughed, glaring at him with a face almost purple when he could finally breathe again. "Go get the Hyuuga and bring him back here, get me?"

'Why?' the Genin rasped, reaching for the water.

Yamada's face darkened. "Because I said so!"

Aaand there he went. It was good to be king, sometimes, Yamada thought smugly, watching the little guy go. He wasn't as good at being terrified as Raiku was, but it'd do in a pinch.

Daisukenojo's departure left him with the reptilian gaze of his last Genin.

'Why would Neji ever want to help Raiku?' Ryuu asked with deep suspicion. 'He hates her. He always has.'

"Because he's a stubborn jackass who hates his important family and we're about to make some important people  _real_  unhappy, get me?"

After a moment of watching him carefully, Yamada saw Ryuu figure it out.

The yellow-eyed boy smiled, showing his oddly sharp teeth in what Yamada knew now to be a threat rather than happiness.

'Ah.'

Now all that remained was to use what they had to figure out what the Hokage's and Gairano's next move would be. Then they could make their plan and sort of what they would need to make it happen.

Starting with what the hell the doc thought was going on with little Speedy.

 

 

 

 

 

'Absence seizures.'

Tsunade nodded, keeping her eyes firmly on the Gairano clan head seated in front of her in the Hokage office. For a man who was dealing with the idea that his daughter may be having inexplicable and intense seizures, he seemed very calm. She eased the heat with the paper fan she'd stolen from a lazy medic after she'd put the fear of Tsunade into him, pulling her pigtails to one side to keep her neck cool. The day was unseasonably hot and for all the promise of rain the forecast offered, there was no relief on the horizon.

Her meetings with other clan heads usually involved her deliberately seeming unflappable and poised so that the haughty bastards wouldn't sense weakness and try and intimidate the new Hokage while she was still settling into the position, but this Gairano was an odd one. For a clan head, he wasn't imposing at all. She'd put him at average height and weight, and his military record was … average, though there were a few missions that had made for interesting reading, if nothing else. Everything about him was average, though he wasn't bad looking, she supposed, scanning him with a critical eye. He had brown hair and a slight tan; he didn't have any of the strange alterations to his uniform that Jounin usually adopted. Nothing about him stood out from the other Gairano, who were also universally unremarkable, though in their family she'd met a few frankly excellent nurses.

In addition, from what she could tell, the previous Hokage had been content to let them do their own odd, harmless, thing, but their bland external appearance had made something in Tsunade deeply suspicious from the outset. He couldn't be what he seemed to be, and he seemed to be just… a man, somewhere in his thirties, who happened to have a large family.

Tsunade waited for his response to her theory, sure that couldn't be the extent of it. He didn't seem to be in shock, his slightly heavy-lidded eyes looking somewhere past her left shoulder, but he hadn't responded in any way she recognized as appropriate, even for a shinobi.

That was the other thing. She  _hated_  it when people didn't look at her in a conversation. What, did she not warrant the man's full attention? The skin of her knuckles itched slightly with the urge to smack him and ensure his focus didn't waver, but she had learned a long time ago that provoking things she didn't understand was unwise. The Hokage was supposed to be wise and she would be damned if she'd lose face in front of this middle-streamer.

'What made you think of epilepsy?' he asked eventually. His voice was a little more distinctive, a smooth tenor that she would ordinarily have found pleasing to listen to, but that now just grated on her nerves for its evenness in the face of unpleasant news.

Tsunade pulled his daughter's file free of the paperwork she had otherwise been diligently neglecting, flipping it open to slide across to him. 'Your daughter has been dissociating during conversations, usually preceded by anxious hyperventilation. She's unresponsive until the episode ends,' she described, letting her words flow out on auto-pilot so that she could give the matter some more thought. From the page, Gairano Raiku's wide-eyed, innocent face stared out at them. The girl had just drifted off mid-conversation, or her eyes had gone glassy in silence when she wasn't watched. Tsunade didn't like it and she'd seen it before, just like she'd seen shinobi-clan fathers with shinobi-weak children take bad news with this same blankness.

Tsunade drummed her fingers on the table and kept describing her theory of his daughter's state, even as her theory of their shared emotional one grew less positive through each second he failed to react.

I've told you that your daughter may die, she thought. Feel something.

But here came the trick, here came the test. 'I believe,' Tsunade told him, pulling the file back towards her without moving her gaze from the Gairano's face. 'That your daughter's condition is being caused, or exacerbated, by the lightning techniques taught to her by your family.'

At last,  _at last_  his distant grey gaze snapped to hers. It would have stunned a lesser being, the sudden and  _true_  sharpness in his eyes and it was a surprise to even Tsunade's hardened system. But Tsunade was far stronger than this man, than his whole family, and didn't allow herself to flinch, even as he stared through her.

'Why?' he asked, and for all his appearance, his voice remained as smooth, as innocently curious as ever.

Tsunade felt something like victory at her recognition of holding the upper hand. 'Your family techniques seem to involve making and storing electricity inside the body,' she said, pulling out another, thicker file with feigned carelessness, the rather old Gairano file that didn't really have anything in it, other than the universal acknowledgement that they were all rather weird, but ultimately harmless. Recently it had notes about so-called 'family techniques', though nothing solid. The old Hokage had been indulgent, but he hadn't been an idiot. 'I think that electricity is playing havoc with her body. She hadn't shown any signs before she started to use them?' she asked as absently as possible, pretending to go over the file when she was really watching his reaction.

He didn't have one, really. Not a real one. He raised his eyebrows in surprise that seemed genuine but that she just  _knew_  was not. 'What? No, of course not, I would have taken her to the hospital.' He even sounded offended.  **  
**

Tsunade supposed there was a chance that she was being uncharitable, that maybe his reaction was sincere and he was just emotionally stunted. She could have been wrong.

On the other hand, she  _absolutely was not_.

'Then it's logical to assume, since she's been using them more,' she said pleasantly, closing the file to steeple her fingers. 'Your daughter will stop using the techniques and we'll go from there.'

'She already has,' he said and did he ever blink? His eyes were narrowed and suspicious. Oh, finally, a response, Tsunade thought unkindly. She didn't like this. She didn't like him. She had no particular attachment to his daughter - she thought the girl was too nervous, too easily spooked to be a good kunoichi unless she had a split personality no one had picked up on. It wouldn't have been the first time. But Tsunade had lived in Konoha almost all of her life and she was sick to death of clans and the way they behaved. There were no exceptions to the law, no autonomous justice in Konoha. The clans would answer to the Hokage. The Hyuuga had already expressed discontentment with it, naturally, but if she was completely honest, she'd expected the Gairano and the Aburame to give her the least trouble.

They'd never  _been_  trouble. Hell, until a few days ago she could have said that the Gairano couldn't have made trouble if they'd been given an instruction guide and two Uchiha to help!

And then the top Gairano's daughter had come to hospital having seizures and dissociating and instead of keeping with their trend of cheerful harmlessness, their whole family had inexplicably locked down tight. **  
**

She hadn't thought anything of it. Protectiveness was a common family trait in Konoha. Then the techniques had been mentioned and his daughter had been so flighty after the massive explosions between Sand and Konoha when she had finally gotten back to the Hokage's office and it would not have been uncharacteristic, in times of unrest, for clans to put their own children in danger to gain power. It would not have been uncharacteristic for unimportant, unremarkable clans to experiment with forces that they didn't understand and then to lie about it, no matter who got hurt, and this reeked of power grabbing.

She wouldn't allow it. Not here, not now and  _not_  in her hospital.

Tsunade smiled at him and knew it wouldn't reach her eyes. 'That's not all.'

The Gairano regarded her shrewdly and said nothing.

'I've been watching her carefully, and there's another step we'll need to take.' It was time to see if her suspicions were correct. 'We'll need to drain your daughter's system of the excess power she's been storing-'

'No-' he broke the word off quickly, but not quickly enough to hide it.

_There._

Tsunade did not like being interrupted and from the way Gairano looked away from her face, back to the air over her shoulder, he knew that he'd given himself away. It hadn't seemed conscious, judging from the cut-off syllable; it felt like a knee-jerk reaction he hadn't been able to restrain in time.

Which meant she was on the right track.

'Something wrong?'

Gairano shook his head. 'That would damage her.'

'Really?' Tsunade settled back in her chair and tasted victory, fanning herself again. 'Explain.'

He hesitated.

He  _hesitated_ , and Tsunade knew that whatever he said next would be a lie.

'Using the techniques over an extended period makes the body dependent on the extra power,' he said after a moment.

'Then we'll have to be very careful, won't we?' she asked, crossing one leg over the other. She'd cracked him. His defense was splintering as she watched. He'd have to tell her the truth about the techniques or kill his daughter, and it didn't look like he was willing to sacrifice his only child-

'Yes,' he said, interrupting her train of thought, sitting back slightly in his own chair. Tsunade stared, refusing to show her disbelief.

He wouldn't.

'I suppose we will,' he agreed, meeting her eyes again with a look of grim stubbornness that she wouldn't have expected from such a mild-mannered man. 'Thank you, Hokage,' he added with a bow as he stood. 'I appreciate the care you've taken with my daughter.'

The repetitive sound of the ceiling fan above them was the only thing that broke the silence as Tsunade stared at him and refused to betray her feelings on the matter.

'Of course, Gairano,' she replied eventually, unable to think of a way out of this that wouldn't kill a child, but equally unable to forfeit her position of authority so early on and against such an unimportant opponent in the fight against clan hegemony. 'I'll keep you informed.'

The heartless bastard  _smiled_  at her. Close-lipped and small, but he fucking  _smiled at her_.

'Thank you.' He glanced out the window, the bright light reflecting off his bleached grey eyes. 'Keep an eye on the weather,' he added casually towards the blue sky, the wisps from the day before growing into more respectable clouds in the distance. 'It looks like it might turn.'

Tsunade nodded and fanned herself again. 'I'll keep that in mind.'

She had erred, and misjudged a man, and now she had a procedure to prepare for.


	48. narrative passengers and defensive props

"Alright!" Yamada boomed, standing in front of the motley crew assembled in his downstairs living room. "Time to make a plan to get Speedy out of this bind, get me?!"

'If your teammate is genuinely sick,' and Neji's voice implied that he absolutely did not believe that she was, but he was sitting between two other rookies and a Jounin so he had to hear them out, 'and you take her out of hospital, what's to say that she'll survive? They're performing this procedure to try and save her life. If you interfere, you could be saving her from one death just to watch her meet another.'

Yamada eyed him. Daisukenojo winced. Hyuuga had not yet learned that Yamada was both omnipotent and omniscient, and that wasn't his fault. He would learn. Painfully and quickly, like Ryuu and he had before him.

But...

'He's got a point,' Daisukenojo admitted grudgingly. 'Even if we get her out, after what Ryuu saw...'

Neji turned his skeptical gaze onto the teen in question, whose face remained impassive. 'If we understood what was going on with her, what the hell would we need you for?' Ryuu asked with his trademark bluntness.

Well, Daisukenojo thought irritably. So much for the Hyuuga's help. He was going to ditch them and laugh all the way out the door. Great work, Ryuu.

'And what do you want from me?' Neji asked coldly, " _you can rot in hell_ " broadcasting from every part of him. In all fairness, he seemed to do that every time he got within visual range of their team, so it didn't necessarily mean he'd taken offence to Ryuu's tone. Or so Daisukenojo told himself. Damnit, didn't Ryuu understand how important this was?! They wouldn't get another shot and they couldn't replace the Hyuuga in the time they'd been given! His fierce glare had no effect on Ryuu, tragically.

"Simple," Yamada replied. "We want as many hands on deck as possible. Pulling one over on the Hokage is going to be tricky, get me?"

'Tricky. And career limiting,' Neji said in an icy tone that did not bode well for them. 'To help someone who wouldn't be in trouble if they just told the truth.'

'You really think that you're in a position to criticize someone for not being Open McFriendly?' Daisukenojo blurted out before he could stop himself.

Okay. So maybe Ryuu wasn't going to be entirely responsible for their glorious failure.

The Hyuuga ignored him in a rather pointed way. 'Even if I did agree- our group is three Genin and you, and we've established that you can't be involved in the actual execution in case the Hokage suspects you know something. I think that together, we could probably manage to mug the mailman.'

Daisukenojo fidgeted in place, trying to keep his mouth shut. He made it all of five seconds before Neji added, 'if he was caught off-guard.'

'Were you always this much of a dick, or did opening your heart to friendship let all your bitchiness out too?' Daisukenojo burst out. Neji responded to this by tensing slightly, like he was going to stand and leave them high and dry, so Daisukenojo hastily waved his hands as though he could swat the words out of the air. It usually worked for Raiku, but judging by the death glares everyone was giving him, it didn't suit him as well.

He glowered when Neji looked away. When this was over, he was going to bitch the Hyuuga out so thoroughly that he would... he would definitely  _something_ , Daisuke would think of the specifics later, but it would be  _intense_.

"Shut it!" Yamada roared, obviously having grown tired of their questions and bickering. "You punks leave the thinking to me before you strain something, get me?!"

Neji folded his arms.

Oh no.

Ryuu and Daisukenojo edged away from him on either side, pressed against the armrests of the couch, bracing for the imminent clash.

'No,' Neji said coldly. 'You've given me no reason at all to kidnap a patient of the Hokage in broad daylight. I have everything to lose by helping you and  _nothing_  to gain, so no, I am not going to  _shut up and leave the thinking to you_.'

Yamada folded his own, much more substantial arms across his own, much more substantial chest. He leveled Neji with a critical look, as though searching him for something, before he shrugged carelessly.

"You're right."

Daisuke leapt to his feet in outrage, ready to rip Yamada a new one to even  _suggest_  that-

"There's nothing in it for you. Or us. She's skinny, secretive and spastic as shit. She can barely look a person in the eye when she's talking, and there've gotta be a thousand Genin out there who're better than she is."

Neji raised an eyebrow.

Daisukenojo fumed.

"She can't even  _find_  her chakra," Yamada continued, shaking his head in a world-weary way. "She's smart, but she's so damn panicky that she can't hold on to a plan half of the time-,"

'You were making a point?' Ryuu gritted out.

Yamada coughed. "Right. The point is that she's probably all of those things. But," he tacked on, leaning forward to stare Neji right in the eye and dropping his voice. "She still shouldn't have to die because her family decided she's not important enough to keep alive."

It was a point that went right over Daisukenojo's head, but from the look on Neji's face and the intensity of Yamada's gaze, it was one made effectively. It didn't make any sense to him, really; they had no reason to think that her family had any say in the matter, or that they didn't care about her, so Yamada had to either be lying or exaggerating. But why? Why would that help them recruit Neji? His family was huge and notoriously protective of its members, so why would he ever have reason to relate to …

His eyes darted between them, not sure why he suddenly felt uncomfortable.

After what felt like an age, Neji spoke softly, keeping his eyes narrowed and fixed on Yamada's.

'Tell me what to do.'

A slow smile stretched across Yamada's face. Now they just had to find out how long they had left to do this.

 

 

 

 

 

'Two days.'

Mayuko shielded her eyes against the harsh midday sun and looked up at the sky, squinting through the glare to take in the building clouds. The white fluff had gradually transformed into something with a little more substance, but even the more promising dark grey masses weren't yet delivering, just hanging around ominously and making the air seem oppressively heavy. Oh well.

'The date for the procedure has been set for the day after tomorrow - two days,' she repeated to the Head Gairano, who sat above her on the compound walls, the bottom of his sandals resting almost a foot higher than her head. Shinobi. They were like pigeons, if pigeons were prone to dramatics; the second things got hairy, they perched somewhere high and cooed fretfully. Their family leader was no different, for all that he usually restrained such urges. So there he was, sitting on the top of their wall, staring at the increasingly cloudy horizon and probably getting sunburnt. He didn't respond to her, on top of that, which Mayuko believed to be the height of rudeness.

But still she persisted, pushing the envelope just enough that after all this she could say that she had tried, but not enough that she felt compelled to take up arms when she was inevitably repressed.

Here it went.

'I understand the theory behind this. I do,' she said, choosing her words carefully, fixing her eyes on the white stone in front of her. 'But I have to ask.' She took a long breath in before she continued, pacing herself so that her words seemed as non-confrontational as possible.

'Are you sure this is going to work?'

He leaned back on his hands, tanned face solemn. 'It'll work,' he said after a long silence, his tone indecipherable, watching Konoha where it spread out from the base of the mountain.

Mayuko was, oddly enough, not reassured. 'She's not coping,' she persisted. 'She's dissociating so often that we can't even finish a conversation any more; I don't think she's withstanding the weight of the narrative, I think that if we proceed, we risk it breaking her mind apart before it ever reaches completion.'

'It's not the story that's doing that,' he replied, tension written down the line of his spine and shoulders. 'It's her condition. It's become unstable.'

'Because of what we did-'

'Because of what it is,' he interrupted, firmly but not aggressively. It was a line he often walked. 'It was always going to become more unstable as she matured physically. Without the Plot, any traumatic event could have caused this spike and we would have been completely unprepared. At least this way we have a chance to fix it before it kills her. Or anybody else,' he added, and Mayuko saw the truth in that.

But still.

'Plot or no Plot, how can you be sure that this won't kill Raiku? It's going to remove part of her,' she pointed out, squinting to try and see his face through the glare. **  
**

'It isn't part of her, it's an unwelcome narrative passenger,' and yes, they all knew that, but she had shared her skin with it for so long that it seemed normal now. 'It's not going to change who she is. Once it's gone, we're still left with Raiku,' he said tersely.

'That's only true if this plan works,' Mayuko shot back.

'It'll work,' he repeated. 'As long as everyone sticks to their role.'

'And how, exactly, are you going to play yours?' Mayuko frowned. His presence in the Plot would almost certainly, almost inevitably snap one of its many threads, making the whole thing unravel. It had been almost impossible to attach the thing to Raiku in the first place, and  _she_  was a Gairano who'd been exposed to a Device before she was even fully formed. Someone like him... even untrained Gairano didn't coexist easily with Plots. It was probably the only reason that their rare narrative hijackers usually didn't make it very far. 'It's not like you can just... go with the narrative flow. How are you planning on doing this?'

He laughed at her. Quietly, but he  _laughed_  at her. Mayuko really didn't like that. She took bullshit from doctors all day; she wouldn't take it at home. She forced herself to calm down, but she could feel her fingernails digging into her palms and knew she was fighting a losing battle.

He was under a lot of pressure, she reminded herself. She was probably reading into things too much because she, as well as the rest of the family, was feeding off his heightened stress and getting overly tense.

'Carefully,' he answered, sounding oddly bitter when his amusement had died down, as though his answer helped her seething anger at all. 'I'm going to do it very carefully.'

She glared up at him. 'The procedure is the day after tomorrow, but you should go and visit her before then. If you think you can spare the time,' she added uncharitably. 'She's only lucid for brief periods, now.'

He turned his head back to watch the sky, nothing so clear as a dismissal but an obvious end to the conversation.

Mayuko narrowed her eyes further, until they were just angry grey slits, but said nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

'Are you sure this is the place?' Ryuu muttered, pressed into the ground so that the shinobi scattered around a large, empty field couldn't see him over the rise of the hill. Neji nodded shortly, the Byakugan causing a familiar tension in his eyes and temples as he used it to survey the area. This was the place. Tsunade's apprentice, the older one, had been sent here to get the procedure ready, or so it had said on the piece of paper she had left on her desk. Which was an appalling neglect of security, but it was one that had worked to their advantage. But all she'd done was come here and make sure a heap of metal had been delivered, and then she'd declared it fine and left.

Which didn't seem to be sound medical practice to him, but he was admittedly ignorant of much of the medical field.

'There's nothing here,' Ryuu observed after a while, though how he knew that Neji couldn't tell- they were pressed to the ground by a ridge of earth near the large, empty space, and while he could use his enhanced vision, Ryuu couldn't risk raising his head to see. It was a mercy in that it stopped the wind from slicing through them, the day's weather having turned unpleasant sometime while they were trapped in Yamada's living room, but at least it wasn't raining.

Yet.

But Ryuu had to have found a way to observe without his eyes, because he was right about the place. The space was empty; it didn't even have grass. It was just a wide patch of dirt, almost a square kilometer. In fact, he was pretty sure it was used to test explosives. The forest nearby had been cleared away to remove the fire risk, and it was well out of range if anything went wrong. And they weren't really adding anything, they were just…

Neji frowned to himself in thought. They had driven four large metal posts deep into the ground, but other than that, the materials that they had brought with them were being kept to the side. That made no sense. Why transport that much metal to a place just to leave it lying around?

'Gairano's abilities,' he said quietly. 'How are they affected by metal?'

'They aren't,' Ryuu replied immediately, frowning slightly. 'It conducts the same as it would for anything else.'

'It doesn't drain her reserve,' Neji said, seeking confirmation.

There was a long pause. Insultingly, it seemed as though the younger boy wasn't thinking of the answer so much as he was trying to decide whether Neji should be  _told_  the answer, which was infuriating given how they'd dragged him into this mess. If they hadn't been hiding from the people surveying the land, he'd have thrown Ryuu into the nearest tree. As it was, he was already irritated with himself for failing to ask about her potential output when he'd had her cornered; it was such an obvious question, and he'd missed a chance to ask when she wasn't actively trying to deceive everyone.

Stupid, stupid.

'She doesn't have a reserve,' Ryuu said eventually, and the Byakugan let Neji see, without turning to look at him, that he was staring fixedly at the ground a few centimeters from his face and looked deeply reluctant. 'She just generates indefinitely.'

And wasn't that interesting?

Neji narrowed his eyes slightly, mind working furiously. He'd done as much research on electricity as he felt he would need to beat Raiku after he'd found out her secret; she may have chickened out of the Chuunin Exams, but she had had the opportunity to retract her refusal until a few days before and he wanted to be the strategies he had thought of were all predicated on her reserve being exhaustible. If Ryuu was correct, and there was no reason to think that he wasn't, then it shouldn't really be possible to drain Raiku's excess energy. And they had told him that her family gave the Hokage as much information as she needed to understand her symptoms without knowing about her condition, which meant that the Hokage had to be aware that her energy couldn't be grounded like a normal electrical surge.

So, why…?

He thought back to his conversation with Raiku, a meeting that still made him tense whenever he thought of it. She had said she could stifle most of it. Most, but not all. But what had happened-

It was pointless to try and figure it out based on the information he'd been given. So he decided to ask. 'Have you ever seen her this way before?' he asked after an age of thought, watching Ryuu carefully.

Ryuu was silent again. There were enormous amounts of time being wasted in this conversation, Neji thought irritably.

'Yes,' he replied.

'When?'

Ryuu let out a slow, measured breath through his nose. 'On our last mission.'

Neji narrowed his eyes. He'd heard that they'd had trouble, and that the Gairano and one of the people they had been escorting had been separated from the group. Everyone had heard about the explosions, obviously, but it had been passed off as an attack.

Which, now that he thought about it, was an explanation he had accepted too readily.

'Why did it happen?'

Ryuu's eyes were distant as he remembered. 'She was …'

Neji waited for him to continue after he'd trailed off, but he was growing steadily more annoyed. Eventually, Ryuu seemed to compose himself enough to explain.

'She was being suffocated. When she lost consciousness, there was.' He cut off abruptly, blinking.

'An explosion,' Neji finished, trying to make this go along as smoothly as possible.

'Yes,' Ryuu said, now so quiet Neji could barely hear him. He couldn't read his face, though; it was carefully blank, which he found deeply suspicious. 'We tried to drag her to safety but we were separated, and then there was a second explosion. Her eyes weren't normal then, either, but it wasn't this bad.'

And then there had been a second explosion, apparently, and she had come back completely normal. Neji felt frustrated by this new information, rather than enlightened. He felt as though this field they had prepared, the explosions on their mission, Raiku's human eyes - they were all pieces that he needed to complete the picture, that if he could just get them in the right order that they would tell him what he needed to know to get this done, but he couldn't arrange them in a way that made sense. He didn't like it. Neji didn't misunderstand things. He prided himself on being thorough.

He turned back towards the field, feeling strangely anticipatory. They had very little time, and no plan to speak of.

What were they planning?

What was he missing?

 

 

 

 

 

'Shishou,' Sakura said uncertainly, holding her clipboard protectively and almost jogging to keep up with the Hokage's storming through the white hospital hallways. She didn't actually need the board, but as much as she admired Tsunade, she couldn't help but feel intimidated by her and so every layer between them made her feel a little bit better. She was slowly weaning herself off the props - by the time Tsunade realized she wasn't going to give up on being her student, Sakura wouldn't need to hide behind anything.

But for now, she clutched the clipboard.

'Shishou?' she tried again. Tsunade's amber gaze was fixed firmly ahead, smoldering with rage. 'What exactly is this procedure? How is it supposed to work?'

If Raiku's electrical charge wasn't drained by contact with the ground, how could they remove the charge at all? Sakura had done some research into electricity to try and figure it out on her own, but it didn't make much sense and she couldn't ask anyone for help; no one who wasn't involved with the procedure was supposed to know that it was happening. All the materials said that grounding something removed the electrical charge, but what did you do when that didn't work?

Tsunade didn't stop or slow, still briskly heading towards an elevator discreetly tucked away near the supply closet, well out of the ordinary path of a visitor. 'The technique seems to depend on ambient electromagnetic radiation to work. So, what do you think we do?'

Sakura wracked her brain, desperately piecing together what she remembered from the library. 'We… have to… create a neutral field?' she offered tentatively.

Tsunade's lips twitched slightly. Not into a smile or a frown, but in thought. 'Oh? And you think that'll remove the existing power in her system, do you?'

Sakura struggled for a few minutes, as she'd obviously not given her the right answer. Well, not the entirety of it, or Tsunade would have shot her down immediately. She continued her mental gymnastics for the duration of their elevator ride, but when they reached the ground floor and started to walk towards the hospital exit, she could tell by the twitching of a muscle in Tsunade's jaw that her time was up. 'I'm not sure how we would do that,' she admitted. 'Unless… the charge isn't constant? Then we could interrupt the cycle by just stopping it from re-entering her system? Using the … field?'

She winced, dreading a harsh rebuttal but determined to hear it, forcing herself to look away from the darkening sky visible out the nearest window and at Tsunade, trying to get rid of her reflex of avoiding eye contact whenever the older woman got mad at her.

But when she looked there was a grim, pleased glint in Tsunade's eye, even though her brow was creased and her mouth tight. 'Something like that.'

Sakura allowed herself a moment of giddy triumph before a niggling doubt at the back of her mind raised its ugly head, her hesitation letting Tsunade get a few feet away from her at the doorway, Sakura left on the threshold and her teacher out on the concrete.

'But wait,' she said, half to herself, grip tightening on her clipboard and the rising wind blowing her hair into her face. 'How could we be sure that all the energy is gone? I don't see a way we can definitely be sure that it's stopped.'

'Wrong, Sakura,' Tsunade said heavily, without turning around and looking at her, continuing to walk away under the increasingly cloudy sky, against the rising wind. 'There's one sure way to stop anything.'

 

 

 

 

 

A hand on her arm and the pressure of it dragging down on her, forcing her back slowly and by agonizing inches into wakefulness. It hurt. It hurt.

Raiku blinked slowly, feeling a thousand years old and like her skull was lined with cotton wool, hypersensitive to the point of pain. Wool scratching on her arms with each tiny shift, the weight of the cotton around her torso.

'Raiku,' someone said again and it was her dad, but when had he gotten there?

Raiku blinked again, staring at him. He looked so tired. He looked so much older than he had a few days ago, so uncharacteristically grave.

Had it been days?

She swallowed slightly and wondered at it, but she couldn't muster up the appropriate anxiety. She didn't want to be here and she felt oddly detached, not entirely sure if she was in charge of what she was doing or just watching.

'Raiku,' he said, voice sounding oddly rough and quiet. His eyes searched her confused ones. 'Are you sure you want to do this?'

What, though?

She couldn't keep a thought in her head - trying made her entire body ache fiercely, particularly through her temples and down the back of her neck. Her mind felt like it was being dragged away in a thousand different directions, through copper wiring and cables, being pulled apart.

And that was because of this, because of what she was, so she was sure, of course she was sure.

'Yes,' she said, eyelids drooping slightly as the ache pressed in. 'I want this to be over.'

Which was true, it was so true, because she kept getting yelled at and hurt and she had to lie all the time but she wasn't very good at it and she was so tired of not being able to see her own face because if she could she felt like she could just-

Raiku jolted when her father gently shook her arm, dragging her focus back onto him.

He seemed to want something more from her, judging from the worry written all over his face under and over the weariness she could see there, practically saturating him.

'I do,' she reassured him, not entirely sure what she was saying but positive she meant it. 'I'm just scared.'

Because she was, and how could she not be, when she knew herself as one thing and was about to be another? It was reasonable to be scared. She knew that. But she knew that this had to happen, because this was already so far out of hand.

He gave her a weak, grim smile. 'This will be over soon. You just need to hold on a little longer.'

'Okay,' she sighed, feeling herself drawn inexorably into the current of power shifting through the walls, but stopped by something in the way he paused before he spoke next.

'You ... the Device has to be removed, it's not really part of you,' he said, grip tightening just slightly. 'It would only have destroyed you in the end. This is all I can do to protect you from it.'

She smiled at him warmly. 'I know, Dad.'

He nodded, but didn't look reassured. 'This is all I can do,' he said more quietly, looking at his hand on her arm and saying nothing further.


	49. impossible autonomy and plot holes

So this is where it starts.

 

 

Naruto woke up the same way he always did; upside-down and hanging off his bed. He yawned hugely and stretched his limbs out in all directions, enjoying the pull of muscles that had been still for hours, then sort of half-rolled out of bed and into a standing position. He made himself a questionably nutritious breakfast of instant ramen, shuddering at the sudden reminder of Sakura's reprimanding lecture on the matter, but disinclined to go out and get anything else. He'd only have a few days before the damn Pervert-Sage decided to go on the move again, so he was gonna make them count! Starting by swinging by and seeing Sakura at work. Maybe she'd want to go to lunch with him? It had been ages since they'd gone anywhere together...  **  
**

Lost in his thoughts, Naruto found himself finishing his morning routine on autopilot, grinning the entire time, which wasn't particularly unusual. He eventually ended up standing at the foot of the stairs that led to his apartment, rubbing the back of his neck as he decided where to go first, who to see.

Should he go find Sakura, or try and track down some of the others and go have lunch with her later instead? The Plot at his feet, an unwelcome interloper to his own, much larger narrative, tugged him towards the village and to the safety of other people; people not involved in a small side-story happening outside Konoha limits. It did not belong to him and did not want him to interfere, so the Gairano Plot gently, inevitably steered him a few steps towards the heart of the village before he stopped, and, violating every law set by the Genematrix, thought twice. He thought of how pleased Sakura would be to see him, and how much he had missed her, and made an impossible decision.

He turned, and a single strand snapped free of the elaborate web at his feet.

And this is where it all starts to unravel.

 

 

 

The first thread frays slowly, at first.

 

 

Awareness struck as a sudden pain, her mind suddenly recognizing the ache in her limbs, the dryness of her throat, her brain suddenly perceiving the world again. Her chest was burning. The world was smaller than she had expected when she regained control of herself.

Raiku blinked slowly, eyes focusing. The pull of the electrical current had slowly weakened and she realized she was no longer in Konoha, the feeling of it almost disappearing altogether but she could  _feel_  where it was over the hill. A million connections and conductors working and pulling, but without it hanging over her she was adrift, thoughts flashing past and diffusing into the air too quickly to retain any value. Her mind was spreading out and she ached like she'd been training too hard, but she could finally  _think,_ she was finally _there_.

But where…?

Raiku tried to lift her head and pain rocketed down her spine, making her gasp. She could feel it burning under her skin, could feel her energy struggling to reassert itself. That wasn't right, that wasn't supposed to be happening. She wasn't supposed to be awake. She wasn't supposed to be awake until this was all over. She tried to see where she was, and found nothing familiar.

What was going on?

 

 

 

'Sorry,' the hospital receptionist told Naruto with a strained smile. 'She's not in at the moment. She's out with the Hokage for training.'

Naruto was so used to the brittle cheer and wary looks that he didn't even notice, sending her a cheerful grin in return. 'Okay! Where?'

'I'm afraid I don't know,' the woman replied, shuffling some papers in an attempt to look busy.

Naruto leaned forward over the desk in a way that always worked for Kakashi. 'Really?' he wheedled, giving her his best puppy eyes.

Her expression flattened. Well, Naruto thought, it was worth a shot. He considered his options, a black tendril of narrative curling, unseen, up his leg. Well, it suggested, that was that, then. He'd have to wait, but Sakura would surely be happy enough to see him later. Hm, was Shikamaru back in town yet-

But wait, Naruto thought rather more autonomously, overriding its attempt at damage control effortlessly. He could always just meet up with Sakura  _and_  Tsunade!

No- the Plot tightened, enmeshing his feet in its intricate mass- they  _definitely_  would not like that at all.  _That_ , he thought reluctantly, was not a good idea.

Or, he grinned to himself, it was the  _best_  idea.

The Plot hastily rearranged itself to accommodate this new decision, holes beginning to appear in its solid weave.

'Do you know when she'll be back?' he tried instead. He could use that to figure out where she was! Good job, Naruto, he nodded.

The woman sniffed. 'The Hokage's very busy. They've had to reschedule quite a few things because of the weather, and she's out of the village for most of today.'

'Out of the village?' a slightly rougher voice asked. Naruto turned to look over his shoulder. It was the redhead, the one with freckles. Daisuke? No, wait, it was way weirder than that. Daisukenori? Daisukenojo, he remembered. The shorter boy was looking at them with strange intensity. But he was a shinobi, so that was normal.

'Out of the village,' she repeated tersely, shooting them both a disapproving look. 'She has a lot to do before the storm makes life difficult, so don't you go making it worse!'

Naruto laughed sheepishly and rubbed the back of his neck, knowing he'd been caught. Nothing for it, then. He took a step along a narrative-black path, around Daisukenojo, before he stopped in the grip of a second thought.

He didn't know Daisukenojo, so he'd better just keep going. He might be there to see a family member.

Or, he thought, and when he stopped and turned his head to look at Daisukenojo, the Plot thread pulled taut across his body began to fray.

'Are you here to see Raiku?' he asked Daisukenojo, who nodded distractedly. It had been a shot in the dark, but since it was usually Raiku who got hurt in their team...

'She's not here either,' the receptionist sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.

Daisukenojo's head jerked up so that he could stare at her. 'What?'

The woman raised her eyebrows challengingly, daring him to push the envelope, but Naruto was distracted by how white Daisuke had gone under the freckles. 'Did I not  _just_  explain the weather to you? Do you not  _own_  a radio? Everything's been rescheduled.'

Hatori froze for a moment, then turned on his heel and sprinted in the opposite direction as though hell itself was chasing after him.

Naruto stared after him, blinking in surprise, oblivious to the black mass turning in on itself and disintegrating at the edges. After a moment he shrugged and padded off out of the hospital doors, more determined than ever to find Sakura. The fraying strand of storyline snapped and vanished into nothing.

 

 

 

The second strand follows quickly, ripping free with a sound like a scream.

 

 

 

'Yamada!'

Ryuu jerked awake with a start from where he had been semi-comatose on Yamada's uncomfortable armchair, having fallen asleep the previous night in the middle of planning. From the muffled noise Neji made of complaint somewhere nearby, at least he hadn't been the only-

'Yamada!' Daisukenojo's voice shouted again, closer this time, and then he burst into the room just in time for Yamada to lunge upright on the couch. His freckles were almost invisible against his flush, the younger boy panting and his eyes feverishly bright.

"What?!" Yamada half-demanded, half-groaned.

'Procedure… weather!' Daisukenojo forced out, bent double and trying to get his breath back. There was a sudden sinking feeling in Ryuu's chest.

"What about it?" Yamada grumbled, swinging his legs over to rest his feet on the ground as the couch creaked alarmingly under his weight.

'Storm!' Daisukenojo panted, grabbing the doorframe to support himself.

'It's forecast for tomorrow,' Neji pointed out, voice irritatingly normal for someone who'd just been sleeping with his head on a desk.

Daisukenojo nodded furiously, so much so that Ryuu feared he would topple over and then not get any information out. 'Tomorrow! So the … the…' he gasped. 'It's happening now!'

'What is?' Ryuu grumbled.

Daisukenojo looked like he desperately wanted to roll his eyes but didn't trust himself not to fall over. 'Raiku!'

There was a brief pause, and then the room exploded with movement.

 

 

 

The first begins to pick up speed, vanishing from the weave's outer layers and leaving holes that start to gape and bleed.

 

 

 

 

Raiku moved slightly, trying to reacquaint herself with her limbs and figure out where she was. Why was she awake?

Had something gone wrong?

She was lying on the ground and it was warm, the air almost sweltering. She didn't understand what she was looking at, at first; a dark, turbulent grey above and silver around. She tried to lift her head off the dirt and almost immediately let it fall back again, her neck and shoulders screaming at the feeling **.**  Walls, but she was on bare earth? She could feel it underneath her; could feel energy hurtling and dragging out of her, pulled in all directions. It was so peculiar to be able to feel the earth on her skin, so accustomed was she to being so well-covered.

They were made of metal, but that was the sky? Raiku pieced her situation together slowly, painfully, a place high in her chest burning to the point of distraction. So. Metal walls on the ground, with no roof. This was an oddly hands-off procedure, some part of her noted, the rest of her not quite there yet. She let out a wheezing breath as the pain in her chest got more and more intense, beginning to feel heavy and smothering.  **  
**

How was this supposed to help her; stuffing her in a lidless metal box?When it looked like bad weather, she noted with an increasingly perturbed eye and stubbornly forcing air into her lungs in a series of agonizing breaths. What, were they going to wait for the rain and for the little enclosure to fill with water and drown it out-

Wait. Her already labored breathing faltered when her new awareness finally settled in fully, feeling a familiar stretch and ache under her skin, that familiar thrumming down her spine.

 

 

 

 

'You can't be serious,' Sakura said through lips that felt strangely numb. 'That's… you can't be-,'

'If you don't have the stomach for it,' Tsunade began, amber eyes flinty and her arms folded across her chest as she stood watching Shizune and another, more technologically minded assistant. They were prepping a large, final sheet of thick, carefully reinforced metal, in addition to the four pieces arranged as walls around the unconscious Raiku, hiding her from view. Beyond her, the Head Gairano watched his daughter's prison sit in the middle of the vast empty field with an inscrutable expression, barely squinting against the harsh wind that was buffeting them.

'No,' Sakura said hastily, mind reeling but her gut insisting that  _yes, she could do this_. 'I do, I just can't-,'

Tsunade cut her off again, tone leaving no room for argument.

'If you do, you can.'

Next to her, Raiku's father said nothing.

 

 

 

 

Naruto passed out of the gates, sending Izumo a cheerful wave and sticking his hands in his pockets. He wasn't as good at this chakra sensing thing as Kakashi was, and he couldn't use the summon dogs, obviously, but he still thought this was a pretty good plan.

He smiled to himself, pacing picking up a little from his enthusiasm. He had sniffed around the hospital and the Hokage's office for a while and found nothing, until he'd overheard a conversation about the procedure happening today. Something about a big field?

And he knew exactly where the best place to find one of those was.

So it turned out his years of misadventure were coming in handy after all! He snickered. Take  _that_ , literally everybody. Circling around the village wall at his quick pace, it didn't take long for Naruto to pick up traces of the Hokage's chakra in the air.

He sped up even further, every meter dragging the Plot unwillingly behind him, every step dragging threads free and ripping deeper holes.

 

 

 

At the heart of it, the first thread splits and splinters into nothing. Untethered, the other strings of causality bunch and snarl until it begins to tear itself apart.

 

 

 

Raiku shook her head and swallowed, the phantom taste of ash clogging her throat, flickers of memory making her tense in remembered panic of  _can'tbreathwanttolivecan'tmove-_

No.

They wouldn't.

The heartbeat in her ears was starting to slow down after it had skyrocketed only minutes before, each beat dragging slightly more lethargically than the last, her hard-won consciousness starting to go dark at the edges.

But this was not the time she was supposed to be in control.

Raiku struggled to remember what was supposed to happen, because it wasn't supposed to be her, it was supposed to be the Plot taking care of this! She wasn't to wake up before it was all over, but- no, there was no time to think of what should have happened. The Plot was supposed to find the point at which her Device joined to her mind, and to make it easy for them to separate.

Now, she would have to do it on her own.

The walls closing in and her vision going dark, Raiku tried so hard to feel the divide between herself and the Plot Device, that point at which everything that was Raiku and everything that was not met together. Tried so hard to feel it in herself so that she could release it where it was being dragged out of her and away, so that it could leave her behind in peace, but she couldn't focus and she was running out of time and she couldn't find anything but-

 

 

 

 

Tsunade looked at the sky and squinted slightly. They'd rescheduled because they'd been promised that the weather would hold, but if this wasn't over soon, she'd have some angry conversations to organize. She hadn't wanted to do it until the nasty weather was over, but there was no indication that the damage was reversible at this stage, let alone however far into the future their next available time would be.

There just wasn't enough time.

She caught Shizune's eye and nodded once, decisively, the younger woman and the other man immediately clearing to a safe distance.

In her hand, she could feel a small pulse, the chakra seal of her work beating faintly in her palm. She slowly and carefully closed her hand and felt it flutter. And she concentrated on her chakra intently because she was going to have to be so very,  _very_  careful or she would crush her target inside the girl's chest, and there could be no coming back from that. So she held her hand firm and the girl's life in it, and slowly drew down, until she couldn't feel the answering pressure of a heartbeat anymore.

Tsunade watched the incomplete Faraday cage intently, waiting for a response, waiting for the reaction that she had predicted.

Something uneasy started to rise in her as the silence stretched on and she looked to her right. 'Gairano, you-,'

Faintly at first, then growing stronger quickly, the earth began to shake under her feet and she broke off, looking down and keeping her hand perfectly frozen. Shizune rose from her cover far across the field- this was the chance, wasn't it? They had to finish the cage, but Tsunade shook her head sharply, trusting her instincts immediately and opening her mouth to tell that  _stupid_  girl to get back under cover and then-

There was a sound so loud it seemed to bypass Tsunade's ears and go directly into her bones, a crack of thunder that shook every atom in her body painfully and made her ears explode with agony and a  _light_ \- a column, an explosion of white hurtling upwards from inside the confines of the incomplete cage and she had to close her eyes because it  _burned_ -

And  _oh_ , Raiku thought, in that split-second between the breath and the darkness and everything she was pouring out of her skin; it had been her all along.

With a sharp flare of chakra, the metal lid of the cage slid into place and sealed, closing on the silent emptiness inside.

 

 

 

 

Not right.

Not right.

 _Not right_ , Gairano thought to himself again and again in a determined mantra, using it to drag himself out of the strange daze that the sensory overload of the explosion had caused in him. He dragged himself back to his feet at the same time, feeling his hands shake as he pulled himself up from the dirt.

 

 

 

 

Naruto dragged himself upright and staggering over to where Sakura was crouching, her hands over her ears and eyes screwed shut. 'Sakura!' he yelled over the sudden deafness, shaking his head as though it could shake off whatever was still making the world hazy. 'Hey! Are. You. Okay!?' he asked with the exaggerated care of someone still in shock. He only took his eyes off her at the sound of a hoarse male yell.

Gairano had a hand on Tsunade's shoulder and was trying to make her look at him, even though it looked like his own, abruptly bloodshot eyes were painful to keep open. 'My daughter!' Naruto heard, the sound almost lost to the ringing in his ears. The rest was lost in an incoherent, loud mass, until the world started to clear a bit. The Gairano gripped the Hokage tighter, the older woman finally marshalling her senses long enough to glare at him for the presumptuousness of it. he didn't seem to care, pale under his tan and red-grey eyes wild. 'You're not done!'

Tsunade shoved him away and drew herself up and onto her feet, her carefully braced right hand coming up. Naruto watched with his hand still on Sakura's shaking shoulder, eyes wide. What the hell was going on? What were they doing, out here in the middle of nowhere-

Tsunade loosened her grip slowly until her hand was open and Naruto could abruptly feel a small chakra point in her palm, glowing in the back of his mind. Gairano watched it intently, but after a moment of stillness, a crease appeared in Tsunade's forehead.

And that seemed to be a bad thing.

Tsunade closed and reopened her hand, a spike in the chakra telling Naruto that she'd put more energy into whatever technique she was using. But, whatever response she was looking for, she apparently didn't find it. Her face looked slightly pinched, from more than just her intense concentration.

There was a long silence, except for the wind blowing harshly through the leaves.

Gairano's face didn't flush or screw up like most people in the grips of extreme emotion, but Naruto watched his entire body seem to draw in and become somehow more concentrated, his face almost perfectly still but for those eyes. It was the first time he'd ever seen a Gairano looking directly at something, and...

And then that gaze turned on him, and Naruto instinctively shifted to block Sakura from view, raising his eyes to meet Gairano's.

The naked confusion in them made him blink, the Jounin shaking his head slightly like he just couldn't understand, as though Naruto were some impossible thing. 'You?' he asked, and the word was almost swallowed up in the muffled world the thunder had thrown Naruto into. But then.

Then the change was like ice down his spine, Gairano's eyes flicking from side to side, gears moving visibly in his head and unraveling in the center of Naruto's horrified vision. He seemed to be looking around him for something, for some sort of clue and he stared, for a moment, at the ground at Naruto's feet, which seemed utterly ordinary when Naruto double-checked to see what had made the stoic man so utterly pale. Until finally those grey eyes rested on him again with a sudden, frightening clarity, and Naruto didn't think 'd ever seen that kind of rage in a human being before.

'...  _You_ ,' Gairano said again, that thousand-yard stare boring through Naruto's wide eyes and directly into his soul. He took a single, heavy step towards the two Genin before Tsunade cut him off. She appeared to have snapped out of whatever state she'd been in, her face set in her famous determination.

'This isn't over,' she said briskly, pushing the sleeves of her robe up to her elbows and setting her feet slightly wider apart. 'Not by a long shot.'

Naruto felt Sakura grip his shoulder and pull him slightly, both of them rising to a standing position. Naruto didn't dare take his eyes off Gairano's, but he muttered to her out of the corner of his mouth when he felt his hearing was recovered enough to hear an answer: 'what's going on?'

Sakura hesitated audibly before she answered, hand tightening on his shoulder.

'I think that... Raiku's dead,' she whispered.

Naruto blanched.

Tsunade drew both her hands together just as the Jounin Yamada exploded out of the treeline, one massive hand outstretched.

"No!" he roared, in time for a spike of chakra that made the ground shake.

Naruto had just enough time to grab Sakura and turn his back to the field before the storm cloud that had hovered over the cage exploded with a sound like the sky cracking open. A shockwave of electricity was released and clashed against the enormous shield Tsunade threw up in their defense, so powerful that it blew the nearby trees flat and others exploded from the overload, sending peripheral fires shooting up far from the original blast site. One part of the maelstrom, a bright arc on the edge, broke free and shot across the sky to earth, trailing blue-white energy and sending up another, smaller shockwave when it reached tree-level. Thunder deafened in its wake, the air shrieking and wailing in protest so loud it could be heard for miles and miles and miles-

Behind the shield, the last vestiges of Raiku's Plot vanished into nothing.


	50. one Gairano, one Device

What happened next was a blur. Sakura didn't register that the shield had fallen until they were running,the world splintering into electrified madness behind them, the deafening thunder growing louder and closer, ever closer, the screaming of the air. 'Where are we going?!' she shouted, eyes squinted shut against the wind and the blinding light.

He didn't answer and she hadn't really expected Naruto to hear her, but she had felt compelled to ask something,  _anything_ , letting out one question out of the thousands crowding against her aching temples and crawling up her throat. She could see shapes flickering in and out of sight around them, their fellow shinobi running from something impossible to outrun.

Not running  _from_ , she realised just in time to tense for action. Not all of them. **  
**

Sakura yelled out in warning and yanked Naruto back just in time for the tree he had aimed for to explode into splinters, pieces of wood flying past and leaving cuts on her forearms where she had raised them to defend herself, the bulk absorbed by Naruto's protective clothing and skin.

Naruto let out a yelp of pain and shock, only for another flicker of movement to prompt Sakura into action again. He got with the program just in time to jump to the ground when the branch they had landed on was similarly obliterated, and not by any lightning. Someone with an opportunistic streak was coming after them, but Sakura couldn't pick up a chakra presence strong enough to identify.

'What's going on!?'

'I don't know!' Naruto squinted into the trees over his shoulder, but he seemed to come up as empty as she did.

Sakura drew a kunai and hastily threw it to deflect one aimed directly at Naruto's face, grabbing him. 'Run, idiot!'

He resisted for a moment before finally catching on and pulling her along again, but down to the ground. Sakura kept her head down, relying on her reflexes to keep up with Naruto's erratic swerving but feeling their pursuer's vague, unreadable chakra signature drawing closer and closer, all the more threatening for its anonymity.  **  
**

'They're gaining on us!'

'I know!'

The ground ahead of them suddenly shot upwards, very nearly impaling Naruto before he rolled awkwardly to the side, narrowly avoiding knocking Sakura's feet out from under her with his flailing limbs. They rounded the new earthen spire just in time for something to strike the other side so hard that dirt showered down on them, a moment of brightness and sound so potent that they curled into balls, hands covering their ears and eyes screwed shut.

"What the hell did you think you were doing!?"

Something grabbed the back of Sakura's vest and hauled her upwards before she could do more than scream.

'Hey, let go of—Yamada!? You were doing that!?' Naruto exclaimed in horror.

"Saving your lives? Yes, idiot, that was me!" Yamada snapped from somewhere above her. "Now stop standing around before that thing decides to take a second shot at you!"

'What!? You tried to kill us!'

"You're a goddamn moron and if you don't get a move on now, I'm gonna drag your unconscious out of here in pieces, get me!?"

Sakura felt the need to interrupt, her panic from their earlier pursuit transforming into anger now that it was clear they were safe. 'I can walk on my own!'

"Didn't look that way to me, Pinky!" Yamada denied, throwing her over a shoulder. "Come on, Uzumaki! I can feel some others nearby, and like hell I'm leaving you alone!" He turned and Sakura shot Naruto a vile glare, promising all kinds of nasty retribution if he ever told anyone about how she'd been manhandled out of harm's way. She had been working  _hard_ , damnit, to get rid of her status as damsel-in-distress, and he was not about to go and ruin it for her. She was so focused on communicating that to Naruto that she almost didn't hear what Yamada muttered next.

"Trust Uzumaki to almost get stabbed to death when there's a ball of lightning on the rampage."

 

 

 

 

 

Apparently Yamada had been training nearby, because he quickly shepherded them to a small clearing, crude earthen spires arranged around them as a basic deterrent. A familiar group of Genin was there, and it rapidly became clear that Tsunade's team had been left out of the loop in a significant way. Not only did they seem unsurprised by what was happening, Sakura grumbled to Naruto, they were already arguing about what to do about it. **  
**

'We have to keep it away from Konoha!' Naruto exclaimed, finally catching his breath.

Daisukenojo looked like he was about to hit him. 'How the hell are we going to keep  _that_  from doing anything?!'  **  
**

The only Jounin amongst them looked deep in thought, arms folded across his chest for a long moment before, "Ryuu," Yamada said after a moment, turning an intense gaze on his youngest team member.

Ryuu looked back at him with the face of a boy on the edge, lit up sporadically by painfully bright flashes in an otherwise overcast darkness. '…You can't be serious,' he said with an uncharacteristic lack of composure. 'You-,'

"You've done it before," Yamada pointed out to the bafflement of everyone in the group, but Ryuu cut him off.

'I've steered  _Raiku_  before, this isn't—this isn't the  _same_!' His voice was raised, like everybody's, the crashing and thundering background noise growing and falling in volume but never dropping low enough to speak normally. But Ryuu's yell was higher pitched than normal and his careful composure was cracking around the edges.

"I'm not asking you to do it alone, but we don't have a choice here!"

'This isn't some teenager freaking out! This is something else, this is something dangerous!' Ryuu's eyes were wild with fear and adrenaline. He suddenly looked his age for the first time, his growing panic stripping years of cynicism and bitterness from his features.

'It's going to get back to the village unless we do something!' Daisukenojo pointed out as Naruto tried to shake the niggling feeling at the back of his head that cut a little deeper each time they said "it", tried to get his thoughts together enough to let through the epiphany pressing against his mind if he could only focus hard enough. 'Who knows how many people it's going to kill if we don't stop it!'

'And how do you propose we stop it with her corpse!?' Ryuu shouted, shoving Daisukenojo away from him. 'That's all that's in that cage! Raiku's dead!'

Sakura jolted and looked up at them with sudden inspiration. She pushed herself through the arguing males to stand between them. 'Wait! The technique relies on ambient electromagnetic radiation!' she cried over the growing din. Naruto looked worriedly over his shoulder, but the blinding moments that left the world in silhouetted black and white made it impossible to pinpoint the force's real location. Not that it would have helped, with the speed it was moving at. Not that it was even the biggest of his worries. **  
**

He couldn't feel his pursuer; maybe they had died, maybe they had fled, maybe they were waiting for him and Yamada to part ways, but he didn't think that it was over. **  
**

Konoha was in danger, Naruto, he reminded himself, taking a deep breath. He couldn't waste time being worried about himself when the village was at risk.

Yamada looked at her like she'd grown a second head. "Thanks for the update, Pinky!" he snapped, but she powered through.

'If we can get the cage open, it'll be drawn to the conductors and to… to the body, and then we can close it again! Those conductors are half-buried and should be able to earth the force once it can't feed on the storm!'

Naruto knew absolutely nothing about electricity, with the exception of "oh no, don't touch that", but it sounded legit. Mostly. He felt a surge of pride for Sakura, who was staring down Yamada and only shaking a little.

Yamada stared back at her with a lopsided squint as he parsed through what she'd said.

'…That doesn't sound like a real thing!' Daisukenojo accused.

'Oh good! I can die for a plan that  _won't work_!' Ryuu threw up his hands, seeming to finally cross the edge into hysteria.

Sakura flushed with anger and embarrassment. 'Do you have a better idea!?'

And no, they didn't. They had no better idea, and they couldn't waste any more time. The scent of smoke and ozone was steadily growing stronger and the paltry distance between them and Konoha could be bridged at any time. A slim chance was better than no chance.

'I'll go back and open it!' Naruto volunteered, sticking his chest out slightly to marshal some courage. 'No problem!'

Sakura looked stricken and Yamada glared at him, obviously displeased with the situation. "Oh no, not you! Not while Gairano is out there trying to murder you! Which, if you care to-"

Naruto boggled. 'Gairano!?' What? That didn't make any sense, was Yamada concussed or something? Wasn't Raiku- oh, right. Wait, no, that made no sense as well!

'We don't have time for this!' Neji snapped. 'I'll go with him to help! Can you get it back to the field, or not!?' he demanded of Ryuu, who for the first time ever, looked slightly uncertain. After a moment he nodded anyway, but jerkily.

Yamada's jaw clenched. "Hatori, you come with me. Haruno, you find the Hokage and see what she's doing. Odds are we're going to need her after all this. Get me?" he asked with grim finality.

Sakura swallowed and nodded. Naruto grabbed her arm when she turned to go, drawing her in for a brief hug. Her hands tightened in the back of his jacket for a moment before she let go, meeting his eyes and giving him a tight smile and a nod.

He did the same, letting his hands linger on her shoulders just slightly before he let go.

He looked to Neji, who looked slightly pale. Or maybe that was the light, the violent disturbances shattering the air around them, but it couldn't have helped.

They could do it, Naruto knew. They had to do it, so they could do it.

He smiled to himself and to Neji, nodding again.

Right.

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, just send it back to the field, Ryuu parroted in his mind, feet moving on autopilot to follow Yamada to a small clearing. Steer it back in the opposite direction and hope that it didn't stop by to say hello, obliterating him once and for all.

Simple.

He tried to concentrate and realised his hands were shaking. He tucked them into his pockets and attempted to clear his thoughts, reaching his senses out into the air.

He shuddered, drawing slightly closer to the reassuring mass of Yamada by his side and hoping the other man wouldn't say anything if he noticed. It felt so wrong, it all felt so violently wrong. Its raging through the air was a knife scraping raggedly against his nerves and his mind tried to gloss over it each time he even thought about it.

It ached but Ryuu drew his focus in towards the storm, the path it would need to take to get to the procedure site. It was on the opposite side of it to Konoha, so if the Uzumaki idiot couldn't get the cage open… It didn't bear thinking about. **  
**

It was simple with Raiku. It involved minimal displacement; just a suggestion and she usually took the desired path on her own, hurtling headfirst into any (every) trap he'd set for her, the idiot-

Not the time.

Not the time.

Not the time, he repeated to himself over and over until it stuck, taking a deep breath and starting to draw energy in towards himself.

With both hands, Ryuu took hold of the air and twisted.

 

 

 

 

 

The lightning tore through the forest with grasping, greedy hands that left a trail of destruction in its wake, shrieking through the air and sending trees into the air from the roots in the blink of an eye. Consuming everything in its path faster than the eye could follow, each blink left it somewhere else, taking something else and leaving a trail of fire and ash. A few small figures made their way through the forest but were forced to stop when a wall of electricity barred their way for a moment, before with a flash, it jerked and, impossibly, changed direction once, towards the forest and then again when it ripped itself upwards, returning to the clouds through a winding path of explosive energy.

It took to the sky with a flash that lit up the world like the sun, for a moment, casting a bleached pallor over the ravaged environment before it hurtled away over the horizon. It left a burnt and ugly scar on the forest that crawled up the mountain, its impact triggering a slow, heavy collapse on its upper reaches; a landslide that made the earth shake as it gained momentum on the way down the slope.

 

 

 

 

 

Daisukenojo flailed to try and catch Ryuu as he fell, but his adrenaline-shaky limbs couldn't coordinate in time for him to do much more than pat his back awkwardly and barely keep his balance on the quaking ground.

'It's moving too fast,' Ryuu panted from his knees, white and trembling from the exertion. Yamada mercilessly hauled him up by the back of his shirt and set him on his feet again, the Genin swaying in place, hands shaking. 'I can't keep up. I can't do it fast enough to stay ahead.'

"Try harder!"

'I can't!' The words emerged like they were being ripped out of him, self-loathing flashing across Ryuu's face, disgust at his failure. 'I… I can't do it!'

Yamada bent closer, forcing him to meet his gaze. "This isn't a choice. Get me?"

Ryuu stared up at him helplessly before transferring his gaze back to his hands. Daisukenojo swallowed, his own, useless hands clenching by his side.

Yamada glanced back at him and straightened. "I'll do what I can from the other end and give it some resistance. You just make the path home as smooth as possible. Hatori, you make sure he doesn't get fried."

What? How in holy hell was he supposed to do that!? Daisukenojo wasn't some enormous mass of lightning; it wasn't like they were on equal footing, here! He wasn't even as fast as Ryuu on a good day!

He got the feeling that wasn't going to fly, though, and just nodded, deliberately not meeting Ryuu's gaze. He'd do his best, but odds are he wouldn't be able to save Ryuu if it came down to it. Not either one of them. But Yamada had to know that.

Yamada vanished and left them alone, the two teammates trying to avoid looking at each other and unsure they could be strong enough when their lives depended on it.

Eventually, Ryuu straightened, setting his feet apart and bracing himself.

'Hey, Hatori.'

Daisukenojo looked over reluctantly, in time for Ryuu to nod at him. 'You've got my back, right?'

'No problem.' Daisukenojo tried to smile, but could feel it coming out more like a grimace. 'Looks like I've gotta carry your weight again, asshole.'

Ryuu looked tired already, but determined. 'If you can manage it, dickhead.'

 

 

 

 

 

Naruto threw his weight into pulling the metal slab across the top of the Faraday cage, but he couldn't get good enough footing on the side to put any real force into it. 'What's even in here!?' he huffed, pain building in his straining arms.

Next to him, Neji was nowhere near as red-faced, but still visibly struggling with the enormous weight. 'Gai…rano.'

The body. Raiku's body. Naruto shuddered as he remembered Ryuu saying it, as he remembered the look on the Gairano Head's face and in his eyes.

 _You_.

'What … is even … going on,' he gritted out before he sagged against the side, unable to keep up the pressure. How had they even gotten the damn thing on?! No wonder they thought it'd be lightning proof, this thing was gonna be there until the end of time!

Neji released it with an explosive exhale, pressed against the metal in a moment of rest. 'She's … electrical,' he panted. 'Somehow. They… were trying to get rid of it.'

Naruto opened an eye, the rest of his face pressed against the mercifully cool metal. 'That makes no sense,' he said, muffled by the box. 'No … wonder she…'

No wonder she'd died. Naruto knew from painful experience that you couldn't just pick and choose what parts of a person to keep, and was struck by a sudden empathy for Raiku and the kind of situation that he intimately knew would make a person reject something inside them.

'It was supposed to just be that part,' Neji said on an exhale that sounded like a sigh.

This lightning was that part; it was a part of Raiku? It made sense, didn't it, because Raiku had always been just a little too precariously balanced on the edge of strangeness and secrecy, had always been too twitchy for explanation. But that wasn't it, that wasn't the stray edge that was catching at Naruto's mind. It was a missing piece that fit the space, but not perfectly enough for an  _"ah, that's it"_  of clarity, it wasn't  _enough_.

But there wasn't any time for that.

There was an explosion that made the ground shake and a spike of Yamada's chakra, making Naruto huddle closer to the metal reflexively. They didn't have forever, but whatever Tsunade had set up, it was clearly designed to keep the damn box closed and maybe if they'd had someone else to help, but…

 _You_.

Or maybe not. Naruto pushed himself away from the box to look at it, Neji pausing for a moment before he did the same.

'There's no seal on it, it should just move!' Neji's usual composure was breaking and his hair was even slightly dishevelled around his frustrated features. Neither were good signs.

There was another ominous boom.

Naruto turned.

They had had a reprieve when the lightning had hurtled through the forest towards the distant mountain, but a sudden, enormous ridge of earth had shot up from the far-off greenery, huge even from this distance and a deliberate blockade against the cataclysmic path of black and burning destruction. It was Yamada's, probably, and  _holy shit, it hadn't liked that very much_.

He turned back. 'We need to get it open!' he yelped, making for the box again. 'Right now now  _now_!'

There was a silence in which Neji obviously turned to look at the forest behind them as well, but Naruto was too busy scrabbling at the edge to pay any attention until the Hyuuga was suddenly beside him, working on the edge with similar desperation with chakra-laden hands.

It was coming, it was coming towards them and its path wasn't direct but he could spare no time to see how far away it was, so each brush of the wind against his neck made his heart race even faster, convinced that that would be the last thing he ever felt, limbs tensing and blood surging with the giddy rush of desperate adrenaline.

Finally, the slab budged. Less than a millimetre, nowhere near close enough, but it  _moved_. Naruto bared his teeth in a strained grin of triumph, jaw clenched and face red with the effort. It was working! It was going to work!

He dared to try and look in Neji's direction to see if the other boy had noticed too, but the metal plate suddenly yanked itself back into place. 'No!' Naruto wheezed, adjusting his grip on the top like it would undo the damage. 'Neji, come on!'

Neji's reply was not what he expected, and didn't come from where he had thought he was. 'Uzumaki, look out!'

Something grabbed the back of Naruto's shirt and tore him from the side of the cage, hurling him into the air and away. There was a moment of weightlessness before he really registered what was going on, and then he hit the ground with a jolt that rattled his bones and ripped what felt like half the skin of his body off. **  
**

A pair of sandalled feet was what he saw when he dragged his head up from the dirt, tracing up the legs of the owner until he finally saw in flickering light and shadow, the pitiless eyes of Raiku's father.

 _You_.

Gairano's hand closed around his throat, hoisting him into the air with a choked-off cry. Naruto gasped in air through a constricted windpipe and scrabbled at Gairano's vice-like grip before he came to his senses and kicked the older man solidly in the chest with both feet instead.

Right.

Shinobi.

Released, he practically hyperventilated in his eagerness to get oxygen into his lungs, coughing. 'What… the hell!?' he rasped, massaging his throat and feeling the heat of blossoming bruises under his hand.

He heard Neji's shout, but couldn't tear his gaze away from the face in front of him. 'We have to get the cage open! What are you doing!?'

'It stays closed.'

'What? Why?!'

Gairano tilted his head slightly. Naruto had never felt this way before, like a bug under a magnifying glass, like something squirming under a microscope, but he'd never been the focus of a stare like that. It wasn't in his nature to balk, and he had faced much more dangerous men so he wouldn't anyway, but it wasn't because Gairano was someone particularly intimidating, it was because… because he…

He couldn't put his finger on it, but he didn't have a chance to try and figure it out. Neji made for the cage and Gairano swiftly sent him staggering back. He wasn't strong like Kakashi, or even Gai, but he was still a Jounin, and with him working against them combined their limited time frame…

To hell with it; they could do it! They had to.

Naruto pushed himself up into a crouch and caught Neji's eye. They would have to work together if they were going to do this. Neither one of them could open it alone.

Taking initiative, Naruto tried to buy Neji some time to catch Gairano off-guard.

'Getting that thing open is our only way to protect Konoha!'

Gairano flicked his fingers in a careless "what can you do" gesture that left Naruto gobsmacked, offended down to the core of his being. **  
**

'We have to protect the village!'

Gairano was saved from having to respond by Neji coming at him from the side, Naruto immediately launching himself to attack the opening he left when he turned. A burst of force threw them both back, less than a metre but enough for Gairano to get an arm inand throw an open palmed attack swiftly through Naruto's guard, landing hard enough to drive the air out of his lungs. Gairano blocked Neji's incoming strike in the few seconds this bought him, hard enough for the impact to make a resounding noise. Neji managed to keep him gripped for a moment, chakra leaking out around his fingers and forcing Gairano to keep his arm straight.

But only for a moment, and not long enough to make a difference. Gairano suddenly dropped tension from his outstretched arm, sending his bent elbow directly into Neji's collarbone and following it up with a headbutt that landed with a crunch. Neji made a sound of muffled agony and lurched back, blood streaming from where he was clutching his nose with his free hand.

Naruto caught Neji before he could trip, still wheezing slightly. For something that hadn't felt chakra-heavy, Gairano's palm had hit him with enough force to make his ribs ache worryingly on each inhale.

Once again, Gairano stood between them and the cage.

'Why are you doing this!?' Naruto demanded, effect somewhat ruined by his breathlessness and the rasp his voice was starting to come out as. He was lucky the strangulation hadn't made his throat swell up beyond talking, but it still hurt like hell. 'People will die!'

'People always do,' Gairano replied.

Neji's shoulder tensed suddenly under Naruto's hand. '…Did you plan this?' His voice was distorted and muffled by both his hand and his injury, but the question was clear enough. He yanked himself free of Naruto's grip while the shock was still setting in for the blond. 'Did you plan for this to happen!?'

Plan for it? Neji thought that Gairano had planned to, what, use the electricity to attack Konoha? To sacrifice his own kid for it?

With a crawling sensation of horror, Naruto saw how easily it all fell into place if that was the truth.

But no, it couldn't be, could it? Raiku was his daughter; he couldn't just… throw her away! Gairano had looked so horrified, so angry when it was all happening…

But what if it was an act, put on to convince Tsunade?

Mind spinning, Naruto struggled to find an answer that made sense, but didn't have the chance before it was all starting again.

'Ah,' Gairano said eventually, focus shifting until his usual, distant expression returned, staring at something behind Neji's face, at nothing at all. 'Having trouble seeing past your personal traumas, aren't you.' More a statement than a question, but it baffled Naruto. **  
**

Regardless, it seemed to hit its mark. Neji inhaled sharply. 'You …' He seemed overcome, the words forced out through an overwhelming anger. 'You murdered your daughter!' he spat.

Gairano's hands twitched by his sides. The corners of his lips twitched, features shifting through myriad expressions that Naruto couldn't quite decipher until they finally settled. Settled into one he could put a name on and he suddenly understood why he had been so put on edge by the man, because there it was something more dangerous than anger or scheming in Gairano.

Desperation.

The rumbling Naruto had barely registered was growing stronger beneath his feet and he looked over his shoulder just in time to see what was coming, the end of their time and their options.

'Neji!' he screamed. 'Get down!'

Gairano finally turned his head and looked away from them towards the coming storm, a small frown appearing on his face, like this was some small inconvenience and not the failure of the plan, the  _only_  plan that they had. Naruto threw himself to the ground and shielded himself with his arms, eyes screwed shut and braced for impact.

When it came, it consumed him from the inside out. The sound and light tore down his spine like his back had split open, filled his chest with pressure that made his ribs ache and constrict, hot against his insides. It ripped him open and scoured the inside of his skull with fingers made of pain and brightness that pressed out against his eyes and ears and—

Passed him by, vanishing somewhere behind where he was curled. **  
**

Naruto took a breath that hurt all the way down, huddled against the ground and …still alive, still alive? He clutched at what parts of him he could reach with his arms still against the earth and felt through tingling fingertips that he was … he was…

He slowly and carefully lifted his head. His field of vision was one enormous dark spot that wavered and swirled, but where it was clearing around the edges he could see an enormous mass of crackling light, that had… just missed him.

When he could finally see what was really going on, squinting against the agonising brightness, he didn't understand for a moment what it was he saw. It hadn't moved on, it hadn't blown through and obliterated them before taking its ravenous greed to Konoha. The clouds above were lit up from within and roiling with energy, blown by the chaotic wind. Lightning was bombarding the metal cage in the middle of the scorched earth, hurtling into it again, again, again, each colossal impact sending force and heat out in endless waves, each impact like a punch into Naruto's chest, a blow that he felt down to the marrow.

That wasn't  _right_ ; he didn't know much about this, but he knew that that wasn't how it was supposed to behave. It wasn't going anywhere, it wasn't even heading back into the forest; it was just hammering at the metal over and over, luminous bolts of electricity slamming and crackling against the edges, almost like…

Like pale fingers scrabbling at steel.

_You._

Naruto's mouth dropped open as realisation hit, the facts at last cascading into place at the same time he saw Gairano standing silhouetted against the light, unharmed.

_You._

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku's father had stood by until he couldn't stand it any longer. This was a step too far, over a line he hadn't realised was there until it had been crossed. He had found himself ripping Naruto away from the cage in between jolts of lightning, felt it burn and crackle along his skin where it had just missed him and the answering sizzle along his nerves. Felt a cold and savage satisfaction run through him as the boy, the Plot-black Catalyst flew through the air to land awkwardly, ripping skin from his hands and holes in his clothes to stop his skidding. Gairano took a step towards him, and then another. And another. Each step brought him closer to that human catastrophe trying to regain his balance, powering through the tangled net of his obligations and the Genematrix's resistance.

Gone. Gone. It was aching through him with each beat of his heart and he couldn't bear to stop and think, had to keep moving or he would falter. He would fall from where he stood on the precipice of a grief deep and paralysing, and he couldn't afford to, not now. He would be damned if he was going to let his daughter be just another stepping-stone for Naruto's character development. Not when she'd been everything, the only thing, and now she was nothing.

A white blur moved to intercept him and Gairano leaned back slightly, just enough for the Hyuuga's open palm to cut through the air in front of his nose. He followed its path with his eyes and could see all at once the way the day would follow from there, and how this would all end. For him. For them. The rage that had stirred at the back of his mind, the leviathan inside his subconscious rose again to consume him and froze his blood in his veins.

No.

He had no Plot and so he was going to lose; he could see it in the blackness scrawled between them, but no. No. No Hyuuga  _side character_  was going to make him step down and let Naruto destroy the only part of herself that (Raiku. Raiku.  _Raiku_ )- that  _she_ had left behind, just to satisfy some Genematrix loose end that Naruto had torn free in the first place.

Gairano reached into the Plot-thick air and Hyuuga's eyes widened, body twisting to avoid the attack to the midsection that he had anticipated, that never came. Gairano's hand curled into a fist to grasp at the narrative black and  _ripped._

Neji stopped.

After an age, he fell and didn't rise, his body limp against the blackened earth. Gairano registered Naruto's inarticulate yell of dismay, his hand curled around rapidly vanishing Plot, the section of story in which Hyuuga held him off and Naruto saved the fucking day trapped in his fingers. Hyuuga couldn't continue until that now content-empty time had passed and he resumed as though it had never happened, but the answering hole in the Hyuuga's personal narrative ached in his mind's eye like an open wound. It would have to be fixed, it wouldn't be stable and god knew how much damage he had done to the path of his storyline, how far the ramifications of this single violent and impossible act would spread in this kid's life. Maybe nothing, maybe everything would change without this cautionary footnote.

He found that he didn't really care.

He was facing a crime he'd committed against the most fundamental moral code of his family and all he could think was that she'd trusted him. She'd trusted him to look after her. He'd done everything he could but it still wasn't enough, because he was a Gairano and he could never change anything that mattered. But he had been so sure that he could do it, just this once, because Raiku hadn't mattered at all except to him.

'If it weren't for you, she'd still be alive,' Gairano said, and he could feel his grief suffocating under the weight of his rage. 'Raiku.' Raiku, Raiku, Raiku, gone forever because they were Gairano and Naruto wasn't and she hadn't done anything to deserve this. The Genematrix only cared about important people, and it didn't care how important she'd been to him.

'Wait!' Naruto exclaimed, raising a hand as though to hold him back. 'You don't understand!'

'I don't understand?' Gairano smacked that outstretched hand aside, grabbed the fist Naruto tried to throw his way and shoved the arm back into the boy's chest before he could straighten it enough to punch properly. 'I don't understand,' he repeated conversationally, almost lightheaded with the combination of rage and incredulity. Some part of him, a more rational and measured part, tried to figure out why Naruto's narrative intuition had brought him to this at all, since he knew better than anyone that it never did anything for no reason. But the rest of him couldn't care less, when the results were laid out before them.

Naruto's intense, beseeching gaze was infuriating. 'You can't just throw parts of people away! It doesn't-,'

Gairano's lip curled. He wasn't some introductory-arc training-wheels villain for Naruto to practice on. Naruto couldn't fix this with some rousing monologue on his capitals-worthy "Way of the Ninja".Naruto couldn't bring back the little girl who'd never mastered fingerpainting without setting fires or holding a normal conversation, couldn't reanimate the hands that had left their fingerprints all over his life by seeing into Gairano's heart and  _understanding_   _his pain_.

So he didn't really feel bad about how satisfying it was to press that captive arm harder across Naruto's chest, forcing him on his back against the ground and rendering him unable to draw a full breath. Even though he knew it wasn't Naruto's fault. Not really. He was just some kid who was unfortunate enough to be the center of the universe. He hadn't meant to do any of this, and realistically, Gairano should have … set his house on fire, or something,  _anything_  to keep him away from this whole mess. But he hadn't, and he should have remembered that being able to see fate hadn't once let him protect someone from it yet. **  
**

'Raiku… means…' Naruto wheezed, and Gairano was forced to admire his tenacity, if nothing else. '…lightning…'

Gairano raised an eyebrow. That was it? That was the kind of grand revelation that Naruto used to win the hearts and minds of others? He felt a little bit cheated. Lightning struck the cage behind them with a clap of thunder, over and over, a white noise Gairano had long grown accustomed to overlooking.

Of course her name meant lightning. He'd named Raiku for her Device, when it had been unclear what it really was, so long ago now. It had managed to get past his wife's field, and hers, but she had survived it, so it had made sense to recognise its significance.

It had been a useless statement. Strange. Naruto would not ordinarily make a useless statement now, at the crux of things.

But Naruto was not, apparently, finished. He gave a weak, wavering smile, blood in his teeth, a terrible kindness in his eyes. 'Raiku,' he rasped, 'is. lightning.' **  
**

No.

His instinctive rejection surprised him with its intensity. What was the big deal? Raiku had always been electric, had always been attached to the Device that made her so. That was just the way it was.

But that hadn't been what Naruto said, he realized. It wasn't that Raiku  _had_  lightning, that she had a Device. It was that she  _was_  lightning.

That she was the Device.

No.

Gairano lurched to his feet, to feel the world spinning and hear fate laughing at him.

No.

It couldn't be possible. No. Raiku was his daughter and a Gairano, and no… no  _Device_  could ever get more than a foothold in their fields, let alone forge that kind of complexity. Raiku was…

No, Raiku was a Gairano. His wife had been a Gairano. It was not possible. It could never have gotten through the field.

Raiku was…

No, Raiku was a Gairano. His daughter, and she was not what Naruto was trying to tell him she was, because that was impossible for one of them.

But his wife had been one of them, his wife the Gairano, and she had died. And Raiku, the Gairano, had not, and he had thought it was a mercy. He had thought she had been the only good thing to come out of the whole mess, and living with the Device was a small price to pay for that.

Raiku was...

Raiku was not complex, though. Not in the way that people were complex.

He was breathing harshly through his teeth and clenching his hands so tightly that they ached. He was stepping back, he was staggering and he was being flooded with thoughts so tightly organized into one epiphany that they had to have been Plot-formulated. Forced together into one solid wave of truth that made him sick.

Her incomprehension in the face of human motives. Her strange, desperate hunger. The way that she loved, as one thoughtless, raw nerve, and how easily he could have taken inhumanity for naiveté. How easily he could have mistaken simplicity for honesty and how a more basic, elemental nature would struggle to evolve, trailing behind its more complex peers. And oh, how she'd tried, struggling endlessly and inexplicably to understand how other people changed so drastically in normal, human ways. He'd watched and remembered his own adolescent awkwardness, blindly accepting that answer because Raiku and her electrokinesis, Raiku and her Device, was tolerable. It was acceptable in a way that Raiku the Device was not, more acceptable than the idea that the human, the Gairano owner of that life had never lived it.

'You can still save her,' Naruto panted, painted in blood and dirt, 'if she dies, it'll be because you let her.'

Impossible. Unthinkable. Life didn't work like that for them. The universe didn't give back what it took away. Not to them, and he had long seen his family function as collateral, their lives payment for other people's miracles. Even if it was true, it was his duty to destroy it, because the idea of a Device gaining sentience, being raised like a child (his child his Raiku) was a new and terrible development. He was a Gairano, and they didn't tolerate Genematrix machinations. He was a Gairano, and it was his job to stop things like this from happening. It was wrong and it was impossible and it couldn't be this way. He shouldn't have to choose between his family and his daughter.

And the more he thought about it, the more it became apparent that he wasn't going to, because there was no choice. Suddenly he found that he hated Naruto, and himself, because with a feeling like the slow collapse of years of belief, he knew that he would always take Raiku the Device over Raiku the corpse. Every time.

Naruto stood up behind him and took a wary step forward, and Gairano thought wildly for a moment that he could do it, if he really tried. Right then. He could kill him. Maybe the Genematrix would never recover, maybe the fabric of the world would unravel at Naruto's passing like it did so often at his behest, but maybe it wouldn't. And then this would all be over, and it could be so  _easy_.

No, it couldn't.

He found himself calming in the face of his task, his resolve returning now that he had decided on a course of action. He took a step forward, squinting against the light, bracing himself as even that small movement towards it made the intensity of it hard to bear. The Hyuuga had been wrong, naturally, but he was only a Genin. The cage  _was_  sealed shut, but not with a traditional seal. He could feel the traces of the Hokage's chakra through every inch of it, supplemented by her apprentice's, keeping it anchored in place. But it was only an anchor, and the metal was starting to glow hot at the seams. It hadn't been designed to withstand this kind of assault for so long. But the storm was losing force, still violent, but less rapidfire. It couldn't sustain itself, trapped in place.

He began to walk forward slowly, holding a hand up to shield his eyes from the brightness, the world turning white around him as he approached. The air was suffocatingly hot, and after a few steps, the sound became less a thing that he heard than he felt, deep inside his ribcage, down his spine. It could destroy him at any second, or Naruto, who was trying to keep up but who couldn't have been used to it.

After an age, he placed his hands on the metal of the cage, coated in chakra. It was vibrating so hard that it rattled his teeth and made his eyes water. When the lightning failed to destroy them, something seemed to settle into place in his mind. Idly, he wondered if this was how Raiku felt all the time—surrounded, consumed by energy and light—and then he braced himself against the side and pulled, pouring chakra out through his skin to bombard the seal in place. It didn't budge, until a moment later, a far more singed Naruto almost slammed into the side in his haste to help.

By milimetres, the slab began to move.

Naruto shouted something, but he couldn't make it out.

The seals began to snap, until the tiny pulses of chakra ceased and the cage slid open. With a blinding flash of light and clap of thunder that sounded like triumph, the storm broke, and the world went dark.

 

 

 

 

 

Yamada wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaning heavily on the ridge of earth he had thrown up to try and help Ryuu. Fucking Raiku. Fucking Gairano. Forcing him to get involved,  _god_ , it had been years since he'd needed to put this much effort into anything. His chakra hadn't had to work this hard since... hell, he could barely remember, and now he still needed to round up his unruly mob and get out of there before—

'Yamada?'

He froze.

Sakura leaned into his field of vision, slowly. 'I found Shishou.'

Unwillingly, he turned his head.

Tsunade smiled at him, one hand resting on Sakura's shoulder in a proprietary fashion.

'Hello, Yamada.'

Oh god fucking  _damn_.

'Fancy seeing you here.'

 

 

 

 

Ryuu collapsed with a sound of relief and Daisukenojo barely managed to catch him before he hit the ground. 'Ryuu!? Ryuu!'

He clutched him awkwardly, staggering under his weight. He looked around for help and of course, saw no one. A quick check revealed that Ryuu was unconscious.

'Well, shit.'

 

 

 

 

The smell of ozone and the rain came down, in seconds a steady downpour that quickly soaked them both to the bone, cooling the air in a wave of relief. It brought cold reality back to Gairano, made the aches in his body and his quiet doubts suddenly important again.

No. He'd given in to Naruto, like everybody else. He was supposed to be smarter than that. Naruto's narrative imperative could have made him believe anything while he was vulnerable and now, whatever it was that woke up inside Raiku's body was out of his hands. What if Raiku wasn't what he had been so quickly convinced she was? Would he be trapped with it, now, a stranger with Raiku's face? He waited for the confirmation of his fears, the sudden emergence of a fraud in his daughter's skin.

His doubts lasted until a tiny vibration made him realise that the inside of the Faraday cage had been knocked on, tentatively. Gairano Chitose raised a hand to cover his eyes, shoulders starting to shake from relief and bubbling hysteria.

'Hello?' a weedy female voice called from behind the metal. '…Hello?'

Some metres away, Neji finally stirred, rejoining the wider narrative with a loud and jarring inhale, suddenly aware of himself again as his story resumed. The voice from inside the cage tried again.

'Is it over? …Anybody?'

Raiku's plaintive, uncertain voice was the sweetest thing he had ever heard.

'…I can't get out.'


	51. ink brushes and awkward letters

Immediately after Raiku's moment in the spotlight and the shattering of her father's worldview, the Genematrix resumed its machinations, which meant it had some catching up to do.

And for most of them, it wasn't really a big deal.

Mayuko stopped in the middle of writing some obs.,and frowned.

'Did you feel that?' she asked a co-worker, who was searching desperately for the pen Mayuko had just stolen from her.

'Feel what?' the junior nurse asked vaguely.

Mayuko frowned, tapping her stolen writing utensil against the desk. 'I'm not quite sure. Something like a ... rapid rush of air?' When you worked in a hospital in a hidden village, it paid to ask about even the most seemingly innocuous things.

'What? No,' the younger woman replied, almost scoffing. That was fine. She'd soon learn about deeply improbable things happening on a daily basis,and then Mayuko would be the one laughing.

But she was sure she'd felt something. 'I'm not sure how to describe it. Like the pressure in the room changed, all of a sudden.'

Giving up, the junior nurse leaned back in her chair and sighed. 'I'm sorry. I didn't feel anything.'

Not, Mayuko thought, like that meant much coming from someone who hadn't even noticed Mayuko taking her pen out of her front pocket.

But, still. It may just have been her imagination— _wait a damned second_. It was  _never_  just her imagination. Mayuko  _never_  just imagined things. That wouldn't even have occurred to her. Not naturally, anyway. Which meant only one thing.

She looked down the nearest hallway and noticed the lights beginning to flicker, the endlessly ringing phone at the nurse's station suddenly picking up in speed. The air felt strangely charged, and if she focused on it just right, it seemed to have black fragments swimming in and out of view.

Mayuko put the pen back in her pocket and braced herself. The Genematrix she could deal with, but she'd never get her hands on another working pen in a hospital.

 

 

 

And then, of course, there was Raiku.

Raiku woke up, which seemed an unlikely turn of events. She even woke up in her own bed, yet more improbably.

It was early; the light coming in through the window was weak, and the air was still. he didn't remember how she'd gotten home, didn't remember much past arriving in the hospital and Mayuko's interference afterwards.

Hospital?

Raiku frowned. She wasn't in hospital, though. Those were the scorch marks of her ceiling; this was the smell of her laundry powder on the blankets. They were familiar things, but she felt strangely as though she had missed them. An even stranger sense of relief welled up in her at the sight of them.  **  
**

She felt fine.

Cautiously, she let her eyes flick over the room. No one was there. Still careful, she sat up.

Still fine.

Now, given the past few months, it was understandable that Raiku was immediately seized by paranoia at her sudden good health. She was slightly too warm, but that was basically the norm anyway, and she was otherwise… fine. She felt… fine. There were still remnants of that painful, gnawing hunger, but it was so faint that it could be easily ignored. It still seemed more mental than physical, but it was now as though it had been so intense a part of her that her mind just couldn't quite let it go yet. Almost like the afterimage from a painful flash of light, it seemed burned into her mind. Almost like it was a phantom there only because she felt like it should be, which was … different.

She no longer felt as though she didn't fit inside her skin anymore, as though she were stretching out past her body. She actually felt a little more settled than usual, a little less inclined to twitch and flee at a moment's notice. The hum of power through her nerves was comforting in its familiarity, even though she knew it shouldn't be there. **  
**

A sudden shaking jolted her out of her bewildered self-examination. She clutched reflexively at the bed for stability as the floor shook and tendrils of black Genematrix influence started oozing up from between the floorboards. **  
**

Raiku took in this new developmentwith her usual grace and poise, considering her options carefully before deciding on an appropriate response.

'Dad!' Raiku shrieked, flailing her way down the shaking hallway. Her legs were weak and unsteady, so it was more of a hasty wobble than a run, but she managed not to fall down the stairs on her way to grasp the kitchen doorway for balance. 'What's happening!?'

Her father looked up from the piece of white paper in front of him on the table, an ink brush in his hand. 'Raiku! It's so good to see you up and around!' he beamed. His hair was oddly brindled, blackened and shorter in places, while the rest of him bore occasional bandaging.

Raiku stared at him. A painting was knocked loose from the wall and crashed to the ground behind her.

He seemed to realize what she was upset about, and waved a bandaged hand at her vaguely. 'Don't worry. We're just experiencing some minor temporal adjustments. How are you feeling?'

'Adjustments!?' she demanded, ignoring his questions and almost braining herself on the kitchen counter when she made a break for it. 'What are—!'

The room spun and darkened, whirling around her until she managed to lurch free of the spin and onto stiller ground.

'Just relax,' her father advised sagely, patting her on the back as she threw up into the patchy flowerbeds outside their house. Or, what she thought were the flowerbeds outside their house. It was too dark to tell. 'Try to go with the flow.'

'What?' she croaked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked around, suddenly aware of their new location; surely they had been inside. They weren't anymore, seemed to be out around the side of their home and it was dark, the area lit only by the lights coming from nearby windows. She was growing more and more stressed with every new detail she absorbed. 'Why is it dark?! Why are we outside!? Wasn't it… just…' She paused as a terrible thought occurred. She went white. '…I'm not—'

'No,' he denied quickly. 'It's not you, Raiku, it's—'

She gripped her hair tightly, feeling as though she could drown in her rising terror.'I'm going insane again! I'm going to have to go back to hospital and then you're going to have to try and deal with Tsunade and I still don't know what—'

'Raiku!'

She yelped again, but she was fortunate enough to already be posed to cower, which saved her some time. Her father gripped her by the shoulders. 'Raiku, calm down! It's not you! Naruto's undergoing a long-term arc with no major plot developments that involve us!'

She stared at him, completely baffled by this unexpected update on Naruto's life. '…What!?'

He took a deep breath. She found herself automatically doing the same, calming slightly in the face of his utterly unfazed demeanor.

'We're undergoing a minor time-skip,' he said patiently. 'If you just relax and go with it, you won't even notice.'

Raiku was certainly not about to relax. 'A what? We're undergoing a  _what_!?'

'A time-skip. We're on fast-forward so that the Genematrix can get Naruto where he needs to go without him managing to derail it. A time-skip,' he explained. 'It's how it manages to keep him on track so that certain key events definitely happen. This is just your perception of time failing to keep up.'

He smiled abruptly,obviously proud. 'You're resisting it! And right after you got out of your Plot, too.'

Raiku took a moment to try and process this, readjusting her worldview now that this immediate section of storyline didn't care about her anymore. 'My… Plot?' she managed at last.

She couldn't really remember it, and to suddenly find it gone was jarring. She knew that she had been in hospital, could almost smell 409 when she cast her mind back. But the rest was all flickers, snatches of conversations and sensations that felt like they'd happened to someone else. There'd been a… a box, that wasn't a box but a cage instead, and she'd been afraid and in pain and it had felt so out of control and then—

Raiku's stomach cramped immediately at the memory of that hunger. She couldn't remember, she couldn't  _remember_. It existed in her mind only in flashes, memories of explosions and fear rushing to the forefront but still unable to surpass that profound, grasping emptiness. She instinctively curled in on herself as much as she could while still standing up, trying to force that memory down in her mind, to where it couldn't reach her any more. She had  _become_ hunger, trying to remedy a loss so profound that she still ached even now; ached when she could no longer even remember what had been missing.

She couldn't  _remember_.

'Tsunade?' she asked, going for the worst-case scenario.

Her father smiled at her, but it seemed weary. 'The important thing is that you're awake, and you're back with us,' he told her firmly, hands tight on her shoulders to keep her in place, as though she had any intention of going anywhere. He hadn't answered her question. Or rather, he had, but not in a way that she found helpful. Tsunade knew something. Tsunade  _knew something_  and he was telling her that it wasn't important?

What had she forgotten?

What had she forgotten that had made the world rearrange itself like this?

Her father pulled her to his chest and hugged her tightly, bandaged fingers stroking through her hair. She tensed instinctively at the sudden move,but relaxed into the comforting hold when she realized he wasn't going to finally give in and strangle her for the Plot's failure. It must have failed.

He didn't seem angry, though.

Her father took a few more deep breaths before he spoke again, voice oddly tight. 'Don't worry about anything. Leave everything to me, okay?'

Raiku made a noise of agreement, face buried in his chest.

'I'll look after you,' he said more quietly, and she felt him nod. He swallowed, grip tightening briefly. 'Trust me. I promise.'

Raiku let her fingers tighten in his shirt uncertainly, feeling strangely lost. She had so many questions, but she felt as though it would be wrong to ask. Something was different. Something had happened and things weren't the same anymore.

After a few long moments, he pulled away and coughed slightly, giving her a brisk and manly pat on the back. 'Alright. Glad that's settled.'

He straightened his shirt in an uncharacteristically self-conscious move. 'So! The time-skip,' he said in a brighter voice, an obvious change of subject, and she nodded. 'The best thing you can do is to start doing something regularly, so you can use it to check in on your progress regularly. Like a diary, or something,' he explained, waving a hand. 'It'll keep the pace consistent, so you don't miss anything.'

Raiku frowned at him. 'That makes no sense.'

He gave her a reassuringly familiar look of weariness. 'Logically, no. Thematically, yes. Writing letters, keeping a diary, scheduling a highly regular meeting with someone you don't see otherwise,' he listed on his fingers, 'any of these will keep your time-skip pacing at a suitable speed for your mind to keep up with. You won't even notice; it'll feel totally normal.' **  
**

'I can't write a diary!' Raiku exclaimed. 'Ryuu will find it!'

Her father rolled his eyes. 'No he won't. Why would he ever be snooping through your room, Raiku?'

A sudden suspicion came over him.

'Why,' he slowly asked, almost glaring at her, 'would  _a boy_  be anywhere near your  _room_ , Raiku?'

Raiku blanched. There was no real way to explain Ryuu's aggressive and invasive form of friendship without her father going on a murderous rampage, even if what he was suddenly so paranoid about what physically impossible. So she deliberately relaxed when the world began to twist around the edges, screwing her eyes shut. 'Oh no!' she said with obvious relief. 'The time-skip!'

'Gairano Raiku, don't you dare even think about avoiding—!'

 

 

 

Raiku opened an eye cautiously, still braced for impact.

She couldn't tell what time it was, and didn't keep a calendar, so being taken back to her room wasn't as comforting as it was the first time. But it was still familiar territory, and at least she had some instructions this time. That was reassuring; she'd been adrift for so long that it felt good to have some concrete plans to deal with the Genematrix again. **  
**

She had a moment now to think about what she was going to do, and all she could think about was how she still felt off-balance. The last thing that she remembered was that things were spiraling out of control, and she suddenly woke up and everything was back to normal. It couldn't be that easy. **  
**

Why was her father so okay with the failure of her Plot? Had it failed at all? Why wasn't her ability gone, why was she the same? Why didn't she have to worry about Tsunade? How much did their Hokage know, how much did anybody know?

Why could she see Naruto in those fragmentary memories, when she was never supposed to see him at all?

A knot of dread and anxiety was growing in her stomach as she sat and brooded, until it occurred to her: she actually had a way to fast-forward past all her worrying, and right to the answers!

She scrambled off her bed and tripped into her desk chair, pulling some paper out of the top drawer.

Letter. Letter. She couldn't risk a diary and she didn't have any acquaintances that she didn't see on a regular basis already, except for foreigners, so it would have to be a letter.

Having escaped her father's protective instincts and faced with the prospect of a narrative device that would skip her past all her problems, Raiku located a pen and started to write to one of her very few out-of-town contacts.

 

 

 

_Dear Gaara,_

Raiku stared at the characters of his name. That she had just written. That she had just unthinkingly written at the top of a letter that she  _was intending to send to Gaara_. She immediately screamed, scrunched the letter up into a ball and hurled it across the room in a panic.

It rebounded off the far wall harmlessly, as though it hadn't tried to send her to an early grave.

Alright. She could admit, with the incriminating letter a few safe feet away, that that had been extreme.

After taking a few moments to calm down while the failed letter sat on the floor and judged her, she pulled a new piece of paper out of her desk drawer. She started again, feeling oddly embarrassed by her outburst.

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_How are you? I'm doing well_

Raiku hesitated, pen hovering over the page.

If this was supposed to be keeping her time-skip pacing consistent, would it matter if she lied? Surely the mere act of writing a letter would be enough.

But what if it wasn't?

Well, it couldn't be that far off the truth, anyway.

After a few minutes of reminiscing, a look of horror on her face, Raiku reconsidered.

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_How are you? I am fine. I hope your training is going well! Mine is going okay. How is your team? I hope you're doing well. Mine is horrible_

Raiku once again paused.

She looked around guiltily.

There was a chance that Ryuu and Daisukenojo wouldn't find out that she'd written that. A chance.

She snorted. It was about the same chance she stood in a fight against Tsunade, so she scrunched up the letter and threw it in the bin by her desk.

She pulled out a new piece of paper and started again. She got to the end of the first few pleasantries before she started to fidget. She twitched. She could feel it there. Incriminating her. What if, through a bizarre and unlikely turn of events, it somehow got into someone's hands?

No, Raiku. That would be ridiculous, she told herself sternly.

Totally ridiculous.

Almost as ridiculous as her being a glorified static shock, that snide part of her mind commented.

Raiku lunged for the wastebasket.

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_How are you? I am fine. I hope your training is going well! Mine is going okay. How is your team? I hope you're doing well. Ryuu and Daisukenojo are going alright, but they've been trying really hard to outdo each other. It's getting a little scary. Plus, Ryuu told me that if I ever got sick again, he would just kill me. I'm really not sure he was joking, though._

And here Raiku found herself stopping again. What was she supposed to write about? Their relationship was based on mutual grievous bodily harm and explosions. Much like her relationship with her team, really. **  
**

She hovered, wracked with indecision.

Letters were her only option. But she was discovering now, several failed attempts in, that she was as terrible at writing letters as she was at having a conversation. She had somehow managed to be as awkward on paper as she was in person. That obstacle was giving her enough time to rethink her impulsive decision, and it was rapidly looking less and less appealing. Her father had said that she didn't have to worry about Tsunade, and she assumed the same applied to her team, but there was still the minor issue of her not remembering the last chapter of her life. It made her understandably wary about going forward.

She hadn't had any time to process anything; would the time-skip address that?Would her memories return, and would her brain fill in the gaps that the Genematrix's fast-forwarding would create? **  
**

She absently started to chew on her thumbnail, beginning to feel anxious again as she stared at her appalling handwriting. **  
**

Did she really want to do this? Maybe she could fight the time-skip off.

But then again…

Raiku sighed.

Her father had said he'd look after her. He'd promised. He'd told her to trust him. He'd told her to trust him and she always had in the past, so why stop now?

She had to trust that everything would be okay if she let the Genematrix take the reins just this once.

She took a deep breath and nodded to herself, putting her pen to paper once again.

It ran the universe anyway; it could handle shepherding her and her family into the next arc just this once.

Raiku winced at the thought.

Right?

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_How are you? I am fine. I hope your training is going well! Mine is going okay. How is your team? I hope you're doing okay. Ryuu and Daisukenojo are going alright, but they've been trying really hard to outdo each other. It's getting a little scary. Plus, Ryuu told me that if I ever got sick again, he would just kill me. I'm sure he was joking, though. I've been spending some more time with my dad, recently, which is nice. I've been pretty unwell since I got back, but everything seems to be better now. How is your new teacher? Who did they pick? Do your teammates like them? Yamada is relieved that I've recovered, I think, but it's hard to tell with him. I think he likes us okay. He wouldn't like to get a new team, probably, so he takes pretty good care of us. Please tell me if you don't want me to write anymore! I thought it would be nice to stay in touch but if you don't want to then that is also okay I mean it wasn't like we really talked that much or_

Raiku managed to rip her hand free of her  _written babbling_  and let her head fall forward to hit the desk with a painful thud.

Oh god. This fast-forward was going to go really slowly.


	52. this doesn't need to be hard

_Dear Raiku,_

_I'm doing well. I'm sorry you've been sick. Everything has been fine, mostly, but my team has been having trouble adjusting to our new teacher. You saw him the day we were going through the selection, his name is Hijino. He's blond and young, younger than we expected, but he knows what he's doing. The twins are the problem. Akihito doesn't like him but Akihiro does, so they're using it as an excuse to fight. More than usual. Akihito almost got Akihiro's hands cut off yesterday. Usually he tries to do it himself, but it was because they got sloppy this time. I like Hijino. He says what he thinks. One of the twins was always going to kill the other anyway, so it's not worth changing captains for._

_We can write to each other if you want._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

"Alright you pathetic little bastards!" Yamada grinned, set in his trademark pose of feet apart and arms folded. "You're back in my hands! Aren't we all just full of joy!?"

Ryuu sighed and rolled his eyes, his yellow stare coming to rest on Raiku. 'So you're still alive,' he observed, ignoring Yamada entirely.

Raiku blinked in surprise. 'Yes, I… am?' she said hesitantly.

'But you seem fine,' Daisukenojo pointed out, pulling on some of her hair and quickly drawing his hand back to avoid the sparks. 'Totally the same.'

She leaned away from him. 'Yes… I am. What's wrong with you?'

'Excuse us for being a little wary, given what happened,' Ryuu said from far too close by.

Raiku recoiled and slipped around to stand on the other side of Daisukenojo, using him as a diminutive, red-haired meat shield. Just like old times. Or every time. 'What are you talking about?' she asked, trying to pretend that it was normal for people to run away from the other people they were talking to. She was failing to pull it off, but the attempt had to count for something.

Ryuu just stared at her intently, as if he was waiting for her to figure it out.

Raiku stared back. After a moment, she broke into a nervous sweat.

Oh god. He knew something too. He knew, Tsunade knew, Daisukenojo clearly knew—who, exactly, was  _not_  clued in here!? Oh yes, Raiku! Raiku wasn't clued in! Raiku was left to flail around!

Yamada powered through. "Given our recent drama, not that I am mentioning any names-,"

' _Raiku_.'

'Shut up!'

"- I've decided!" Yamada continued, raising his voice until he drowned out the burgeoning squabble. "I've  _decided_  that we need someone to learn about field medicine, get me!?" They hadn't met as a team for months, not since before the disastrous trip to Sand, but he'd finally herded the prepubescent menaces into one place and it was time to get things back on track.

There was a chorus of sudden, understanding sounds. Then Raiku and Ryuu both turned and looked at Daisukenojo expectantly.

He glowered. 'What!? Why me!?'

'Well,' Raiku hedged. 'You've… sort of already started, and…'

'I wouldn't trust Raiku to heal me if she had a Tsunade stapled to each hand,' Ryuu said rather more bluntly.

Raiku gaped at him.

He met her gaze evenly, face blank.

Raiku, predictably, gave in after a few seconds of eye contact. 'He's right, I can't do it.'

Daisukenojo recognized a good point when he heard one, but that still left him with one way out, even if it was spectacularly unattractive. 'Why not you, asshole!?'

Ryuu raised his eyebrows. Raiku gasped. 'Not Ryuu!' she exclaimed. 'Anyone but Ryuu!'

'No offense,' Ryuu added to her statement testily, but she shook her head.

'Offense! Offense! I absolutely meant offense!'

Ryuu's eyes narrowed. ' _Excuse_  me?'

'Oh, like you wouldn't just "accidentally" poison me every time I needed healing! You can't threaten to kill me over this! If you're the medic, I'm already dead!'

Ryuu seemed torn between tearing her to pieces or taking the way out she was so gracelessly trying to thrust upon him. Either he attacked Raiku and thoroughly undermined her point, her intelligence and her status as a sentient being, somehow, or he got out of learning something that probably wouldn't let him hurt someone.

Raiku watched with real interest as Ryuu wavered between his two favorite things. Daisukenojo frowned, feeling his fate hang in the balance.

Suddenly, Ryuu smiled.

Yamada jerked back slightly despite himself. Raiku shuddered. Daisukenojo was a little more vocal. 'What is that, what is  _that_!?' Daisukenojo demanded, pointing at Ryuu. 'What is that face?!'

'I'll do it,' Ryuu said, turning to face Yamada, 'as long as I can keep up with the rest of my training too. I don't want to be a medic, so I need to keep working on offense and defense.'

Yamada eyed him like he would a coiled snake. "That won't leave you with a lot of free time, Sullen."

'Well, that's it then. He's going to kill us,' Raiku lamented. 'He's going to kill us all.'

'Oh, I can manage,' Ryuu said.

'I'm sure you can,' Raiku agreed sadly.

'I can manage the training for both,' Ryuu corrected, not even dignifying Raiku's histrionics with a response.

Yamada, after a long and deeply reluctant silence, nodded. "I'll set it up. You're not going all the way to medic, so it should be enough to stick you with one for a while. A few years. Just basic stuff, but it'll be a lot of study, get me?"

Ryuu's smile got even wider. 'I got you.'

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Gaara no no no no no_

Ryuu read what she was writing from over her shoulder, and then ripped the paper out from under her pen. 'For the love of god! It's just a letter!'

Raiku let out a low, long keening sound from where her face was pressed against the desk.

Ryuu crumpled it and threw it across the room to a bin already full of scrunched up paper. 'Start again! You think I want to be wasting my time on this!?'

'You got me into this mess!' she accused, voice high with hysteria. 'You did this to me! You don't get to leave until I'm done!'

Ryuu rolled his eyes. 'Yes,' he said dryly, 'I mercilessly coerced you into exchanging written correspondence. I'm a monster. The world quakes beneath my feet and the people shudder at my name.'

Raiku leaned back in her chair and eyed him warily. 'That last bit sounded a little wistful.'

Ryuu smirked unpleasantly.

Raiku whimpered.

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_Hello again! How are you? It's getting a bit colder here. How is the weather over there? That was a really stupid question. Or was it? Do you have actual seasons? Wait, you live in a desert. I'm sorry. I'm also sorry to hear that your team isn't getting along so well. I remember Hijino, a bit, and he did seem a bit young, but I didn't think Akihito and Akihiro hated each other? Aren't they twins? Shouldn't they be all weirdly close? Please don't tell them I said that. I want to keep my hands._

_My team is doing pretty well, still! Yamada is trying to make Daisukenojo specialize as a medic, but he's refused. He's tired of being shoehorned into that role (his words) and now wants to focus on offense and since I can't do that sort of thing, it looks like Ryuu might have to learn some field medic techniques. My feelings about that are. Sort of mixed? He is very good at techniques. He is also Ryuu. Still, anyone's better than me!_

_Actually no, my feelings are still mixed, they're very mixed._

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku could probably be forgiven for being lulled into a false sense of security when everything seemed to have blown over so nicely. So she was content and relaxed when she walked into the kitchen one fine and unremarkable day, yawning widely. 'Good morning-,'

Raiku cut herself off so fast that it almost hurt.

Tsunade regarded her over the top of her teacup, one eyebrow raised slightly. Their cups were usually chipped and none of them matched, entirely because of Raiku, and the Hokage was sitting in their kitchen like it was normal for her sit there and drink out of them, probably also because of Raiku.

Raiku tried to speak, but instead came out with a sound like a small, dying animal.

Tsunade sipped daintily at her tea, not breaking eye contact.

'Raiku, you're up!' her father greeted cheerfully from behind the kitchen island. 'Do you remember the Hokage? You were a bit sick when you met her the first time.'

Raiku knew from experience that she wasn't capable of casually sidling out of a room, somehow not even the ones she was merely adjacent to, but she was still tempted to try.

The silence stretched on.

'Raiku, say good morning to the Hokage,' her father prompted after it began to get awkward.

Raiku swallowed nervously, kept in place by Tsunade's even stare. '… Good morning.'

Her father helped her along. '…Hokage.'

'Good morning, Hokage. Miss Hokage!' she added hastily, only to realize that  _made no sense_.

Thinking on it, it was obvious what had happened. She was dead, and this was hell. All she needed to do now was wait for Ryuu to show up to make the experience complete.

'Are you going to sit down?' Tsunade asked, eyebrows raised.

Raiku found herself pulling up a chair and collapsing into it immediately.

Tsunade put her cup down. It wasn't logical—it was only a cup, after all—but not having something between the two of them suddenly made Raiku feel a bit queasy. The table didn't count, since it didn't obscure the older woman's face at all.

'So, we've been catching up the Hokage on your condition,' her father said, putting a cup of tea in front of her before he sat at the place on her left. 'Or, Yamada has.'

He smiled vaguely, but Raiku knew him well enough to know he wasn't nearly as unaffected as he was making out. Even if she hadn't been able to recognize it, he couldn't have been. She could still feel electricity humming through her system, which she didn't fully understand, and that was bad enough. Having Tsunade find out about it was even worse.

How could Yamada have just… told her? She stared at the table, her feelings of betrayal written all over her face.

'This could all have been very easy if I had been told at the beginning,' Tsunade said. Luckily, she seemed to be directing her irritation at Raiku's father, who could at least handle it. She smiled thinly. 'Which I should have been. Ethically. And legally.'

'Well, you can't blame us for wanting to keep it quiet,' Gairano shrugged. Raiku noticed he was using the royal "we", which wasn't a good idea if he wasn't trying to make them seem all… clan-like. 'We aren't exactly a powerful family, and it's not like unusual children haven't gone missing in the past.'

Ouch. Raiku couldn't restrain her flinch, but did manage to keep her horror off her face. What was he doing!? This was surely not the time to remind the Hokage of a grand tradition of gene theft and child exploitation!

'If your unusual child had been even slightly less lucky, she'd be gone. Period,' Tsunade replied mildly.

Gairano smiled pleasantly. Tsunade smiled back. Raiku cast her eyes heavenward and prayed for death. The silence stretched on, full of murderous intent and forced social courtesies.

'Well!' Tsunade said eventually, turning her gaze onto Raiku. Raiku obligingly died inside, just a bit. 'That leaves us the question of what to do with you.'

'It does?' Raiku squeaked.

Tsunade smiled like a shark. 'It does.'

'Uh. Um. I was. Going to go and train with my team,' Raiku said hesitantly, eyes flicking from Tsunade's face, to the table, to the floor and then back again on an endless loop.

'I don't think that's going to do it. Do you?' Tsunade asked her.

Raiku was honestly not sure what the right answer was, but she was utterly certain that there was one. She was equally positive that it was statistically impossible for her to get it, so she just fidgeted unhappily.

Tsunade allowed her to do so for a few minutes, looking amused, before she sat back. 'Yamada is an excellent Jounin, but he doesn't know anything about electricity. You'll need supplementary training. Unless someone in your family can provide it?' she asked Gairano.

Raiku's father shook his head. 'Nobody else has this ability. It came out of nowhere.'

Tsunade looked back to Raiku without bothering to speak to him further. 'Then we'll see what we can find out.'

Raiku paled. 'I don't think-,'

'No,' Tsunade agreed, 'but I'm the Hokage, it's my job to think.' She took another sip of her tea and stood, inclining her head ever so slightly at Raiku's father. He responded by standing and bowing, as was only appropriate. She glanced at Raiku, who hastily did the same. 'I'll arrange what needs to be done and tell you when to be there. Good luck with your training,' she added to Raiku, who stared at her, mute with horror.

When Tsunade left, her father going with her to see her to the door, Raiku collapsed backwards into her chair.

She wasn't sure what had just happened. She  _was_  sure it wasn't good.

She was brooding by the time her father came back. He was laughing to himself when he re-entered the room. 'I think that went well!' he told her cheerfully.

Raiku glared at him.

'Well,' he allowed. 'Maybe not  _really_  well.'

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Gaara,_

_Oh god I am going to die no matter how this goes I'm gonna die and you're so scary no no no no_

'What!?' Raiku demanded when Ryuu once again snatched the paper out of her hands. 'I thought I was doing better that time!'

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Raiku,_

_I'm fine. I hope everything is still going well. The weather here does get cold at night, all year round, but even in winter it gets hot around midday. Just slightly less, and it gets much, much colder when it gets dark. We also get a lot of frost. We do have seasons, but many shinobi from other villages recognize that we live in a desert and so assume that we can only deal with high temperatures. It's a stupid mistake. Please do not make it if it comes up. It's a very stupid mistake. What are the seasons like in Konoha? The weather seemed very mild when I was there._

_My team is adapting to our new leader, slowly. Hijino eventually decided to solve the problem of the twin's disrespect by letting one of them walk into a trap instead of pulling them out when they disobeyed him, so they listen a lot more carefully now. Akihito ended up with a long scar across his chest, which made it a lot easier for people to tell them apart, right up until Akihiro gave himself one that's basically identical. Having two people that can't be identified separately is a huge advantage for stealth work, so it made a lot of sense._

_They are not close, no._

_I remember Ryuu as being quiet. He also seemed to have good chakra control. I'm sure that he'll be a good medic, technically speaking. You can always separate from that team once you become Chuunin anyway, but I hope medic-training calms him down._

_Good luck,_

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

"Eighty!" Yamada boomed.

Raiku held herself in the press-up position just centimeters off the ground, red-faced and breathing heavily. 'Is that... enough?' she forced out, feeling like the muscles of her upper body were trying to crush the words before they came out. Her muscles were emitting a faint hum from the strain, since she'd started accidentally conducting more power to them around fifty. It had worked to stave off the pain for the next twenty, but now she was out of options.

'I can do more!' Daisukenojo said from somewhere on her right, sounding enragingly determined.

'Bring it on.' Ryuu immediately rose to meet Daisukenojo's implied challenge.

Raiku tried to focus on how she was losing feeling in her hands and toes rather than the burn in her arm and back muscles, or the similar feeling in her abdomen for keeping her body straight for god knew how long. It didn't work; it only made her more aware of how she'd stopped blinking a while back because of how hard she'd been concentrating on not collapsing.

Yamada was always on board for some extra suffering, unfortunately for her scrawny arms. "Eighty-one!"

'Can I ... tap out?' Raiku wheezed.

"Nope!" Yamada seemed cheerful. Probably because there was now no upper limit on the amount they were going to do, so he could work them until they dropped, again. If they had asked to be trained harder, he probably couldn't get in trouble for inhumane treatment of minors. Again.

'I'm a... girl!'

The weight of Yamada's profound feminist disappointment provided some valuable resistance for her to press up against. "Don't be sexist, Speedy. Eighty-one! I can wait all day, get me!?"

Raiku's arms felt very hot and were also shaking so badly they almost made her teeth rattle. She gritted said teeth together and strained to push herself up.

Yamada approved. "There we go! And after this, we're going to do some  _sparring_!"

Raiku collapsed face-first into the grass.

"But not until you sad sacks do another eighty, since your teammate here is falling behind, get me!?"

A chorus of groans from either side of her. Well, Daisukenojo groaned, Ryuu seemed to be making a low hissing sound, like his inner rage-kettle was boiling over.

Yamada's smile was so wide it could actually be felt as a physical fifth member of their team. "I am gonna work you little bastards like dogs this year! It's gonna be great, get me!?"

'Raiku.' Ryuu sounded strained. And angry. Always angry. 'You are dead to me.'

Raiku clung desperately to the ground. Any time now, time-skip. Any time-

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_Hello again! Everything here is still the same. You were right, the weather here is typically pretty mild. It does get a bit cold, but luckily the autumn rainy weather is over. We do get a lot of fog? Only in the early mornings. It's actually pretty cool, since my family's land is elevated, so when it's really foggy I can go outside and it looks like the whole valley is made of mist. Except for the tall buildings. Thank you for letting me know! I will not make that mistake. I cannot stand high temperatures. I wear a lot of clothes. None of them are fashionable, one of the other Genin told me the other day. Her name is Ino and we had not spoken before then, it was pretty weird. She just sort of came over and told me I was an embarrassment. In a strangely friendly way. A friendly and highly aggressive way._

_Training! Well, we've now learned that I will never be a heavyweight. I would have thought that that would go without saying, but there you go. But! I am much faster than most people, and I can still hit pretty hard! I mean,_ f  _equals_ ma _, right,_ a _has to count for something. Though not if_ m is 0,  _so I should maybe try harder not to lose any more weight. I got taller again but didn't get any heavier? My father makes me eat a lot. So does my teacher. How is your teacher going? Sorry about the weird formula; I hate math, but I am actually enjoying shinobi-technique physics! So now I want to tell people all about it all the time because I'm learning it so it's new and cool but of course you already know all that because you are much more advanced than I am so I shouldn't talk about it anymoreoh godRaiku stop_

_Anyway! I can hit a kunai out of the way with another kunai! I have been able to do that for ages. What I meant is that I can now do it so that the first kunai goes where I want! An easy twenty percent of the time. The rest of the time I just pretend it went to the right place. We all have our strengths. Mine is also a weakness. I am not the greatest shinobi ever. But I am improving! I can beat Ryuu in hand-to-hand most of the time now, as long as no one is using techniques. He always beats me at techniques, since wind trumps lightning,_ _everyone knows that. Especially Ryuu. But Daisukenojo is stronger than me._ _As in, much stronger. He is the strongest physical taijutsu user in our group. Not the most proficient, I mean he is just really physically strong. He shattered Ryuu's eye socket the other day! Ryuu is fine. Now. But really angry. I have been hiding since then, is what I'm saying._

_Hope everything's good with you!_

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

'Stay still,' Ryuu instructed.

"I'm not sure I'm on board with this, get me?" Yamada asked slowly, staring at the grip Ryuu had around Daisukenojo's bare elbow. Raiku hovered anxiously over Ryuu's shoulder, almost audibly fretting.

Ryuu just glared. He'd taken to speaking only in short sentences since his voice had started to break almost three weeks earlier. He seemed to feel that the indignity of a voice that cracked on every other syllable was one he could manage only by ensuring nobody ever found out about it. He had very little success until he'd implemented a controversial but undeniably effective policy of mutilating Daisukenojo whenever the redhead tried to bring it up. Raiku only wished that his sudden stoicism had made him less threatening, but he had only taken the opportunity to hone his ability to savagely deride and intimidate into a more compact form. He would have to keep this up for quite a while, after all, and wouldn't it be terrible if he couldn't make people cry on a daily basis?

'I'm pretty sure you're supposed to practice this on yourself,' Daisukenojo said uncertainly, leaning as far back as he could without trying to pull his arm free.

Ryuu made a noncommittal sound and pulled the plastic cap off a small, sterilized needle. He gripped Daisukenojo's upper arm tightly and watched the skin beneath it like a hawk.

'Also, I don't think field medics are allowed to administer intravenous medication!' Daisukenojo added in a much higher pitch.

Ryuu smirked. 'Ah. Injections.'

'He's... he's got you there,' Raiku admitted with some reluctance.

Daisukenojo glowered at her. 'Shut up, Gairano, or I swear...'

'Done,' Ryuu announced, sealing both needle and cap inside a small disposal bag and pressing a cotton ball to the puncture site with a thumb. Daisukenojo blinked and tilted his head as though that would help him see under the white fluff.

"Good job," Yamada said with some surprise.

Ryuu smiled pleasantly. Raiku patted Daisukenojo on the shoulder. 'Hey! You didn't even feel it! Good job, Ryuu!'

"Exactly," Yamada agreed. "Speedy next."

Raiku took an immediate step back, almost tripping over Yamada's living room ottoman. 'What? No. No, never, no.'

Ryuu turned and looked at her. He managed to communicate clearly that she was being unreasonable, because he was just trying to be responsible and practice finding and infiltrating her venal system.

Raiku knew better. 'I have a thing.'

'Liar,' Ryuu responded, still sounding terrifyingly sweet.

'You've only been doing this for a few weeks!'

'A month and a half,' Daisukenojo corrected, suddenly all for team spirit now that his part was over.

'Irrelevant! Studying for ... for a little while does not qualify you to stick needles in me! They conduct!' Raiku protested.

Yamada firmly gripped her shoulder and pressed down. Feeling the end growing near, Raiku slumped down onto the ottoman. "Take one for the team, Speedy," he advised.

Ryuu reached into his small practice supply bag and pulled out another sealed needle.

Raiku cringed and began to glow slightly. Oh god.

Ryuu pulled the seal open and put the packet aside.

Oh god.

Ryuu uncapped the needle and turned to look at her expectantly.

Oh god oh god oh god oh god—

 

 

 

 

 

_[Front of card]_

_Happy 14th Birthday!_

_[Inside of card]_

_Happy birthday, Ryuusuke. You are studying to be a medic, or so I hear? An interesting choice. It isn't something that most of us would go for, since we all have such a specific natural advantage. We have faith in you, and will keep watching over your progress. I hope your parents are doing well._

_From,_

_Your family._

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku waved awkwardly. It wasn't hard. She'd recently had another growth spurt and was scrambling to gain enough weight to catch up, so she gave off the distinct impression of being simultaneously two sizes too large and two sizes too small. Her every action was awkward.

Well. More awkward than usual. Which was something of an accomplishment.

The strikingly masculine woman across from her narrowed her eyes in response.

'This is Takano,' Shizune introduced from where she stood next to the other woman. 'She's going to be helping you hone your abilities.'

Takano didn't have a glare as effective as Ryuu's, but it still made it clear that she was not a happy participant of Tsunade's plan to make Raiku a useful member of society. Her eyes were a clear green and her very short brown hair actually had some lovely copper highlights, but this wasn't going to last. She just wasn't photogenic enough. Raiku remembered with real longing the days when she knew plain people. Most of her family had actually gotten better looking, such was the Drama that she'd caused. None of them were happy about it. The Genematrix was even less happy about the gap where Raiku and her father had been, so it had only been a matter of time before this came up. It had only been a matter of time before it took another crack at her, and this was the warm-up round. Goddamn.

Takano was a normal Jounin.

This was going to go badly.

'You've been briefed, so I think I'll leave you two to it,' Shizune said to Takano, dusting her hands off before she stuck them in her pocket and made her way off the bridge.

Raiku and Takano just looked at each other for a long time. The wind rustled Takano's short hair, and made a solid effort at Raiku's.

'So-o,' Raiku drew out, rocking her weight back and forth from heel to toe.

'Stop fidgeting,' Takano immediately ordered.

Raiku froze.

'The Hokage has briefed me about your situation,' Takano informed her. She folded her arms across her chest. 'You've been given no training, and you've made absolutely no effort to control your ability on your own.'

Raiku felt this was unfair. Sure, Takano was meeting her purely to buy time until the Genematrix shoved someone more likely to get her into trouble her way, but Raiku had tried. Her and Yamada had tried really hard, and made pretty significant headway for a while. Before her abilities destabilized and made her insane for a month, but the point remained that they had been doing well up until that point!

She felt compelled to protest. 'I have! Yamada and I actually made some exercises to deal with it, and it's not like it's a technique that I can just...'

Takano sighed with enough irritation that Raiku trailed off. 'I meant any  _significant_  training or effort.'

That was actually a little offensive. Yamada had no background in electrical techniques, like only  _ninety-nine percent of Konoha-nin_ , and he'd done well, considering. Raiku realized that her forehead was aching from a tension that it was unused to dealing with, given her usual expressions of terror or cheer. She was frowning. She cast a worried look at the ground, but found no ink-black Plots attached. So she was frowning because Takano was being presumptuous.

Great.

Takano began to walk, indicating that Raiku should follow. 'Our first step will be to establish the proper boundaries for your training.'

'Um, about those boundaries,' Raiku began, scrambling to catch up.

'And then,' Takano continued, shooting her a sharp look for butting in. 'We will be able to work backwards into the finer aspects of control.'

'We already tried that,' Raiku tried again, 'and it went really really badly.'

Takano cut her off yet again with a decisive hand motion. 'I'm one of Konoha's most qualified electricity users. I can handle whatever you have going on.'

Raiku frowned again but recognized the futility of speaking up.

Wasn't this going to be fun?

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Raiku,_

_I'm glad everything is going well. I recently spent some time in hospital. I had appendicitis. Rather, that is what the doctors thought until they actually opened me up and it wasn't inflamed, but they took it out anyway. It turned out that I'd been poisoned by a girl from another team, who was trying to get my attention. I don't think I'll date her, all things considered. She overdid the quantity and that was sloppy. So I guess I can relate when it comes to aggressive/friendly girls. The hospital has better heating than my house, though, so it isn't bad to be there at this time of year. I prefer frost to fog, but that does sound like an interesting view._

_I have never really liked physics. I learn better with a hands-on approach, rather than a more direct academic one. I don't mind if you talk about it. It does not surprise me that the short one is the strongest. Hijino says that short males tend to train harder at physical aspects of shinobi life in order to compensate for their height. I have always been the strongest member of my team, but I am no longer considered short. You may still be taller than me, though._

_I learned an interesting technique recently. I was offered the chance to study puppetry when one of the teachers lost their student, but said no. I like chakra strings, but I find puppets creepy. Also puppeteers are often creepy. Everything about it is creepy. Hijino offered me an alternative and I have taken it. I am enjoying it a lot. I think one of the twins is studying part-time with that puppet technique user. Or maybe both. They have been very secretive recently. I think they are either conspiring or they have girlfriends. Boyfriends. Whichever._

_I am still training hard. I am entering the Chuunin Exam next week. It got pushed up because of the conflict, and I think my team stands a good chance. I will try to write afterwards. If I don't die._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

'So. Let's talk about sex.'

Raiku tried very hard to make herself invisible. Since she was naturally conspicuous, it did her no good.

Mayuko whipped a pointer around to point at some terrifyingly detailed diagrams on their blackboard. 'Sex is something you can never do, ever,' she informed Raiku, her expression deeply displeased. Probably because Raiku's father had conveniently been sent out of town on a mission, choosing to outsource the first of Raiku's major puberty milestones to a reliable cousin. 'It is far beyond your capabilities and that is basically the end of it.'

Raiku raised her hand slowly.

'Questions after the class!' Mayuko snapped.

'But you said that it was the end of-,'

'Questions after the class!' Mayuko repeated.

Raiku slunk down in her chair unhappily.

Mayuko pointed at the board again. 'Anyway. What you ran screaming to me about this morning is called menstruation-,'

Raiku clapped her hands over her ears, going bright red. 'I know what it is! I just wasn't thinking!'

'And it will happen once a month from now until you've spent so long hating it so much that your body finally gives up and stops under the weight of your accumulated rage-,'

'I don't think that's what menopause is-,'

'You wait until this has been happening for a few years, then you tell me about it,' Mayuko said with a frightening glint in her eye. 'Now, the mechanics of this are as follows...'

'If I can't do it, why do I need to know!?' Raiku was coming perilously close to begging. Well, in all honesty, she  _was_  begging. 'Doesn't this then fall into the category of "things I don't need to know"!?'

'Because everybody needs to know these things. Besides,' Mayuko added, with a sudden overwhelming reluctance, 'it's possible that you can later, if you so choose, have some ... more unorthodox types. Of sex.'

Raiku's facial muscles seemed to be frozen into an expression of utter horror. But that was fine, that was probably the only expression she'd need. Ever again. Oh god,  _her father_  had asked Mayuko to do this.  _Her father_.

Dear god.

She existed.

Her father had had sex at least once.

Raiku pulled on her hair and shook her head in silent dismay.

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Gaara,_

_How are you? I am Raiku, if you forgot. You tried to kill me in a stairwell that one time. I am writing! Like I said I would. Because I want to and definitely for no other reason. I hope you're doing well! It took me a long time to recover after I got back from Sand, but I am better now! Yes. I am. I am training very hard, but I don't think I will enter the Chuunin Exam this year, so I won't be coming to Sand. Which is a shame. But oh well! I can always enter it next year, but I think Ryuu wants to enter it this year? He is very impatient. How are your siblings? I am frightened of them, a little bit, but not in a bad way! Shinobi are supposed to be scary! So it's really just a testament to their skill and yours because I am super intimidated by you most of the time which is not to say that you aren't nice or anything even though you tried to kill me that one time but hey no hard feelings_

'Oh fuck it, I'm sending this one,' Ryuu growled, pulling the unfinished letter away before she realized what was happening.

'What?' she blinked. It took her a moment, but reality did strike. 'No!' she wailed, immediately lunging for it. 'Ryuu, you can't! Ryuu! Ryuu, no!'

'This has gone on long enough! It's taken months!'

'Ryuu, come back! No!'

 

 

 

 

 

'This is Gairano Raiku. Raiku, this is Konada,' Shizune said shortly, gesturing between them.

The gangly young man standing beside her waved.

Raiku waved back a little more warily. He looked really, really young. He was dressed like a Jounin, sure, but he had green hair! And... actually, his eyes were almost as bright a blue as hers, and he was pretty... pretty.

Very pretty.

She smiled, feeling the cautious beginnings of optimism.

Shizune didn't look nearly as cheerful. 'After what happened with Takano-,'

'I said I was sorry!'

' _After what happened with Takano_ ,' she continued, 'Konada seemed the next best choice.'

He smiled impishly. His right cheek dimpled. 'I'm sure we'll get along great!'

Raiku considered. He was already contrasting pretty sharply against Takano. They also had similar names. Maybe she'd been too hasty in thinking this would go better.

'And I cannot stress this enough: there will be no explosions!' Shizune added sharply.

Raiku winced. 'It was an accident! She's even mostly okay now!'

'She's even—no. No, we are not going to argue about this,' Shizune told her, giving her a stern look. 'Takano isn't being discharged until the end of the week, and she's refused to even consider trying again. She flinches every time there's a loud noise.'

Raiku scuffed the ground with her foot. 'It wasn't even my fault,' she muttered. 'I did  _say_  it was a bad idea...'

Shizune waved her hand, refusing to brook even that pathetic protest. 'Just don't do it. I expect a report afterwards,' she added to Konada, clasping his shoulder briefly before she sent Raiku another warning look and vanished into a swirl of leaves.

Konada rubbed his hands together, taking a few jogging paces to draw even with Raiku before jerking his head to indicate they should walk together. 'So! I heard all about what happened with Takano, and I agree. We should definitely stay away from the really potent stuff for now, mmkay?'

He was immediately going for the total opposite of Takano, instead of just dialing it back. It was official. He was yet another filler.

'Raiku?' he prompted when she began to lag behind. She made a distracted noise of agreement, well into her brooding rambles.

She was even slightly taller than him, Raiku noted sadly. He was perky and he had beautiful skin and he dimpled asymmetrically and she was going to crush him. She could see it now. Hordes of wailing female Chuunin from his class would mob her.

Konada slung a friendly arm around her shoulders. 'Let's do this, then!'

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_I'm sorry to hear that you were sick. Poisoned. Sick because you got poisoned. I think that not dating that girl would be wise. Yes. How did you do on the Chuunin Exams?! Did you pass? I bet you passed! Unless you didn't, in which case you were absolutely not ready and you should wait longer because of that. Never mind. You probably passed. We almost ended up entering after all, but I basically cried until they said that I didn't have to. Ryuu was really angry. He's been working like a slave for months to keep up his training alongside his studying, so finding out that he couldn't try for Chuunin basically made him incoherent with rage. I would have been squished like a bug. I mean, my taijutsu is improving, but I can't use anything else really, and I haven't found anyone to help me with that other thing that I can do, so … there's that. But! I can now use chakra on my feet! And sometimes my hands! Consistently, but only for the feet, the hands are still touch and go. Ha! "Touch and go", because they're… hands. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry._

_I also think puppeteers are creepy. I am glad you won't be one._

_But seriously, please write soon so that I know you're still alive._

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

'Happy birthday!'

Raiku groaned and rolled over in bed, pressing her face into her pillow to try and block out the light. She'd been a much dreaded Morning Person her whole life,but she'd started finding sleep more and more addictive, which could probably be attributed to her more intensive training. Or possibly her slow spiral into teenagedom, which her father had been watching with extremely vocal horror. She could probably get away with sleeping in on her birthday, she thought. Probably. If she could ignore him for long enough.

It was no use. Her father grabbed her shoulder and pulled until she was on her back, sitting on the bed next to her. He smiled at her and held out a small, shiny bag.

Raiku eyed it blearily.

He shook it.

She dragged an arm out from under the blankets and took hold of the little string handle, her sleep-weak hand almost dropping it immediately. 'Thanks,' she yawned, pulling herself into a sitting position. She stared at the bag, noting that it was quite pretty. It had little shinobi frogs on it, which was pretty cute. Not a bad gift. Did seem rather odd, given she had some bags already.

Her father waited for a few seconds, then sighed slightly. 'Raiku. The present is inside.'

Raiku yawned again, mostly to cover her sudden embarrassment. 'Of course it is. I was... just admiring the bag. Was what I was doing,' she grumbled. He clearly didn't believe her, but he had woken her up, so. There.

She fished around inside it and her fingers closed around something rectangular, which revealed itself as a book when she pulled it out. She squinted through her hair at the title.

'"Everybody Understands You (Let's Not Get All Teen-Angst About This)",' she read aloud.

Her father beamed. 'Served our family well for generations now! We give a new copy to all our young teens. It was written by an Uchiha,' he pointed out, tapping the author's name near the bottom. 'Just for some interesting trivia. I guess they'd have dealt with the angst a lot more than us. It has their trademark ... omnipresent rage. And snide remarks.'

Raiku stared at him.

He tapped her forehead. 'You should get reading.'

Raiku continued to stare.

'Chapter three is my favorite,' he added. He dusted off his hands and sauntered out, calling, 'pancakes in five!' as he left.

Raiku blinked, unable to wrap her sleep-addled mind around what was going on for a few minutes.

Eventually, she flipped through to chapter three.

'"We All Remember What It Was Like To Be Your Age (This Doesn't Need To Be Hard)"?' she read.

 

 

 

 

 

_Raiku_

_I am still alive but really busy I did pass the Exam I will write again soon_

 

 

 

 

 

'So.' Ino threw herself onto the stool beside Raiku with a complete lack of warning. 'Your teammate, Rui, he's getting pretty hot.'

Raiku choked on her udon.

The shorter, but infinitely better looking blonde continued on as though Raiku wasn't experiencing death-by-noodle right next to her. 'So what's going on there, is he dating the other guy, or... or what, what's the deal there,' she asked, fixing Raiku with a pale blue stare.

Raiku finally gasped in a full breath, flushed and panting. 'Excuse me?' she rasped.

Ino sighed impatiently. 'Your teammate, Rui-,'

' _Ryuu_?!'

'That's the one, Ryuu. Is he dating anyone?'

This couldn't be happening. Raiku thought that she would have time to prepare for this, time to assemble flashcards and presentations on why dating Ryuu was a Bad Idea. Logically, she did know that for him to date someone would be a good idea, Drama-wise, but ... something in her balked at the idea of willingly and knowingly inflicting him upon another human being. With his... being Ryuu. And his personality. And also that sociopathic disorder of his that had been coming along so nicely. But for all of her brooding and speech-writing, she had never thought she'd be ambushed with it in the middle of lunch. She quickly glanced down at her noodles. Maybe she could assemble them into a small sign, or a diagram or something, maybe she could-

Ino snapped her fingers in front of Raiku's face. 'Hey. Hey! Focus.'

Raiku jerked back. 'He's a sadistic maniac!' she blurted out. 'That's his deal!'

She expected some sort of denial, but Ino just rolled her eyes. 'Yes, we're all insane. We know this. But is he gay, is what I'm asking.'

Raiku gaped. 'No! You don't understand! He's a psychopath!'

Ino gave her a patronizing look. 'I was the head of the Sasuke fanclub for years, okay. I can do psychopath.'

Dark spots were starting to appear in Raiku's vision. She realized that she had stopped breathing, possibly to make sure that Ino's particular brand of crazy couldn't get into her airways. 'No?' she squeaked out.

Ino sent her a dazzling smile. 'Great! Thanks. I'll look into this, maybe. I don't know, there are a few promising guys.' She patted Raiku's head and put a note down on the table. 'Lunch is on me! See you, Gairaki.'

'Gairano?' Raiku offered faintly.

'Right, right.'

Raiku stared after Ino as she left, still left reeling from the whirlwind of horror that her lunch had turned into.

Across the table, Daisukenojo's chopsticks dropped from his numb fingers, his face still frozen in horror and shock.

'Thanks for all your help with that, Daisukenojo!' Raiku exclaimed shrilly.

 

 

 

 

 

_[back of desk drawer in Sand office, crumpled blank page: front]_

_[back]_

_From Gaara_

 

 

 

 

 

Shizune massaged her temples and closed her eyes, counting out a slow breath.

Raiku hovered nearby. After a prolonged period spent writhing in social agony, she opened her mouth.

'Don't speak,' Shizune immediately instructed.

Raiku closed it, but she shifted on the spot. The need to apologize, yet again, for the whole Konada thing was becoming ever stronger. It was very nearly a compulsion by that point.

After a very long silence, Shizune dropped her hands and opened her eyes.

'I'm sorry!' Raiku blurted out. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry-!'

Shizune imitated talking with her hand and then sealed her fingers together. 'Be quiet!'

Raiku closed her mouth again, looking pitiful. In the visible part of her face, anyway.

Shizune sighed heavily. 'What are you going to do?'

'Nothing?' Raiku squeaked.

'And what are you not going to do?'

'Explode?'

'Or?'

'...Implode?' Raiku attempted, trying to sum up the post-Konada rule in one word and not quite getting there.

'And what your new teacher is going to do is...?'

'Read the file!' Raiku supplied, holding up a thick envelope.

Shizune nodded, but still didn't look pleased. 'We had trouble getting him to agree to this, so you need to take it easy for at least the first day.'

'Okay! I can do that!' Raiku would have agreed to anything to make Shizune less angry with her.

Another sigh. '... He's not from Konoha. Originally.'

Raiku blinked. 'Okay?'

'... He's...' Shizune seemed to be struggling with something.

'He's...?'

'Here. Hello,' a slightly husky male voice interjected. Raiku almost jumped out of her skin but was by now so used to it that it was restrained to a significant twitch. An older shinobi in casual clothing leaned forward from the other side of the railing, balanced on the thin edge between rail and the edge of the bridge. He smiled at her. His teeth were  _perfect_ , she noted with no small amount of awe.

'Murasaki,' he introduced, holding out one broad hand. She took it and didn't so much shake it as was shaken by it, mostly because she was too caught up in staring.

Murasaki was absolutely gorgeous.

'This is Raiku,' Shizune cut in when it became clear Raiku was either frozen with terror or awe. It must have been hard to tell on someone so heavily obscured.

Murasaki's smile grew even wide, making laugh lines around his eyes crease. How old was he? Raiku didn't have an accurate gauge of human progression through time, but he had to be as old as her dad. His hair was much darker, except for grey at the temples, and his tan much more pronounced, and he was absolutely gorgeous.

'...Murasaki's'a name,' she managed to mumble.

That had not been what she had meant to say. She had meant to say that it was a weird name. How would you even write that name? Would it have "mura" and then another one, or...? Not that Raiku would need to write his name all over everything or anything ridiculous like that, because that would be ridiculous and also—

Oh.

Murasaki was smiling at her again, and his bright purple eyes were lit up with amusement.

Well. Just the character for "purple" then. That was a little on the nose.

'I think we can take it from here,' he said to Shizune over Raiku's shoulder. Shizune nodded but just looked at him for a while before she set off for the village again.

Raiku raised the envelope slowly, still staring at Murasaki's improbably windswept hair. The name thing didn't mean anything. Sure, names based on obvious physical attributes were a sure sign of a filler character, but not always!Kurenai wasn't a filler character! Wait, was she a filler character-  _there was no time to deconstruct character construction here_. No, wait, Raiku was a good example! She'd had a whole Plot and her name was literally her thing! Murasaki was way too much of a silver fox to just ... not come back and spend time with her forever!

Murasaki accepted the envelope and gave the contents a cursory once-over while Raiku prayed that this wouldn't go any further. Any better looking than Murasaki would have to be a Character of some kind, and most Characters were not this magnetic!

Murasaki made the envelope vanish in a puff of smoke and smiled at her.

Inside, deep, deep inside, Raiku began to cry.

'Let's just see what happens, yeah?' he suggested.

Raiku nodded and braced herself, staring with extra intensity to make sure she could remember him in the years to come.

If this was the warm-up, things were looking increasingly dire.

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Raiku,_

_I passed the Exam. I am now a Chuunin. So are both of my teammates. I am sorry my last message was very short; there were a lot of things to get organized. Qualifying to be a Chuunin means you have to officially register as one and the Exam and registration date were both pushed back, but the deadline for registration was pushed back too far and had to be done before I even went to a doctor. I am still alive. I am not hurt. I was hurt, but it was very minor. I saw some shinobi from your village and was going to ask about your team but decided not to._

_I would write more, but I am very tired still. I hope you're well._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

'Wait.  _Wait_.'

Raiku complied and stopped to let Daisukenojo catch up, shooting him a curious look. 'Something wrong?'

He looked between her and Ryuu quickly, before reaching up. Raiku flinched back instinctively. 'Hey! No touching!'

He shushed her impatiently, hand flattening horizontally somewhere around the top of her head. Silently and carefully maintaining that exact height, he drew that hand across to Ryuu, where it bumped into his hairline.

'Holy shit,' Daisukenojo breathed. Ryuu's eyes lifted to look at the hand, then flicked back to Raiku.

'What?!' she demanded, instantly on guard in the ensuing silence. 'What!?'

'… I'm  _bigger_  than you,' Ryuu told her, an odd glint in his eye. Especially since this wasn't the first time this had been true; Raiku had been outgrown a few times by now, and it only ever lasted a month, or two at the most. She grew like a weed, a particularly unfeminine weed that kept outgrowing her teammates. Sure, it hadn't happened since Ryuu had gotten all... teenage-y, but that couldn't make that much of a difference.

Though this did seem to be being taken rather differently. Ryuu's expression was a strange one. With a sense of horror that grew only stronger the more his lips curved upwards, Raiku realized that she could  _see his teeth_.

She paled and waited for the end.

But it didn't come. After a moment in which Ryuu looked at her with that strange, intent expression and she looked mostly with terror at the strange, fierce curve of his mouth, Daisukenojo abruptly shoved them apart. 'You two are such freaks!' he said with a complete lack of ceremony. 'Stop staring at each other's horrible faces and get walking. My mother'll be pissed if we're late.'

Raiku tried to turn her head back to make sure Ryuu wasn't baring his teeth at her still, but Daisukenojo gripped her masked jaw and turned her forcefully back. 'Now, psycho!' he exclaimed in an unexpectedly high pitch. 'March!'

Disturbed by Daisukenojo's sudden urgency, Raiku reluctantly complied. It had been his idea to stop, she mentally grumbled to herself.

It didn't stop him, for the rest of the trip, from smacking either of them if they so much as glanced at each other. But she had long given up understanding her teammates anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_Congratulations! ! ! ! I am not sure how many exclamation points are right there I sort of got carried away but CONGRATULATIONS! ! !_ _Good job! You are now a Chuunin! And too cool to be my friend. Penpal. It's presumptuous to call you my friend and I shouldn't do that but yay! I didn't pay attention to who was going to the Exams this year, so I maybe didn't even know them, so it doesn't matter that you chickened out of asking them. Plus, my team is still working hard. We've been taking low-level missions to get money for new equipment, and since Yamada is picking, they are all horrible. But I've been working on some specific type of training on my own and I think it's helping? A bit? It may also be making it worse. But I'm already really awkward-looking_ _so I don't want to be all awkward as a shinobi as well? I don't know why it bothers me so much, I have always been an impossible dork._

_Oh god I just used the work dork I am a_ teenager  _no no_

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku sighed and let her head fall back to rest against the wooden side of the bridge, tapping her bare fingers together to make amusing little snatches of light.

Shizune was seething. 'I swear, if I have to wait here for five more minutes...'

'We've been here for ages; is this the right day?' Raiku groaned, legs splayed out in front of her. She was just about ready to melt into the concrete, and the heat was making her sleepy and grumbly. To her great displeasure, Konoha was getting warm again, signaling the onset of her absolute  _favorite_  time of year. To top it off, they'd been out in the sun for over an hour. Shizune had come to collect her, which had been interesting to see in its own right, but then the new teacher had been... nonexistent.

Raiku smiled despite herself, feeling the light breeze cool the sweat on her forehead. Shizune hated coming to her house. She was a highly competent medic, attached to the Hokage but with almost no Drama rating of her own, and was really very attractive. Almost every Gairano shinobi under the age of thirty was dying to get her attention, as Shizune had found out the hard way the first time she'd shown up. Unfortunately, since Gairano weren't particularly significant as individuals (or a family), Shizune had no reason to trade her current boyfriend for one of them, even if she decided to break it off independently.

Man, Raiku marveled. There were going to be some broken hearts when Shizune got married. She was going to have to start making consolation cards, if her dad hadn't started already. Had her dad started already? He was pretty good at predicting this sort of thing, but it was still pretty—

Her thoughts were interrupted by Shizune's muffled scream of frustration. Raiku inched away along the concrete, the skin of her palms leaving black marks where she used them to push her along. That seemed an oddly intense response for an hour of waiting.

Raiku eyed the older woman warily. Something was starting to seem off, here.

'Maybe we should just pick someone else?' she offered tentatively. Shizune shot her a dark look, but reined it in slightly when she saw how Raiku leaned away. She took a few deep breaths before she answered Raiku's question.

'Konoha does not specialize in electrical techniques.'

'I... I know that,' Raiku said slowly, shuffling even further away. 'But there has to be somebody who's willing to show up.'

A muscle in Shizune's jaw twitched. 'Not as many as you'd think. Everybody's caught wind of what's happened to the last few, and now we're on to our last resort before we jump down to Chuunin.'

A cold chill ran down Raiku's spine. Last resort. Dramatic phrasing. Oh no. Oh no, that was such a bad sign. 'I'm happy with a Chuunin!' she assured Shizune brightly, yanking her gloves back on as though that would help. 'Really, I just need to learn how to-,'

Shizune held up a hand to stop her, some of the tension bleeding out of her. 'Raiku, I'm not mad at you, you can stop babbling,' she said shortly. 'This is just a frustrating assignment. We need this done, or another disaster might happen.'

'That was one time.'

Shizune just looked at Raiku until Raiku slumped. That had been a weak point and she knew it.

'I'm grateful you're trying so hard,' Raiku mumbled, unable to meet Shizune's gaze as she admitted to having any kind of feelings. Sure, Shizune was abrupt and horrifyingly efficient, things any Gairano appreciated, but she was also a woman, and Raiku had no idea how to talk to women.

'It's my job; you don't have to— _finally_!' Shizune broke off abruptly to note, once again infuriated. Raiku looked around, but didn't see anyone nearing the bridge from either direction. 'Do you have any idea how long we've been waiting for you!?' the medic demanded of seemingly no one.

It was entirely possible that she had heatstroke, Raiku worried. How long had they been out there? Maybe it had been longer than an hour; maybe Shizune was under a lot of stress or something?

What she heard next made her wish that she'd gotten heatstroke, or been struck down by a meteorite on the way to the bridge, or had literally anything but this happen to her.

'Yo. Sorry I'm late; I had to save an orphan from an avalanche,' a deep male voice said slowly from somewhere above her.

Slowly, Raiku tilted her head back to look at the enormous red gate immediately to her right.

One dark eye creased at her, indicating that the masked Hatake Kakashi was smiling, or at least faking it for appearance's sake. 'Gairano, yeah?'

Raiku swallowed dryly, unable to take her terrified eyes off the Copy-nin.

Oh no.


	53. the puberting

Raiku couldn't bring herself to ask what the plan was. All she could think was… Well. Well. The Genematrix had really gotten her good this time. Hatake Kakashi was basically the  _worst_  possible outcome of this. How had she not seen him coming? Every teacher had upped the stakes; after she'd exhausted all of them, she was bound to get a Character eventually.

He was still looking at her.

He'd been looking at her for the last ten minutes.

The wind gently ruffled his hair as they sat and crouched, respectively, each looking at the other.

'Should… Should I…?' Raiku faltered her way through the sentence, unable to bear his scrutiny any longer where she was still sitting on the bridge. 'Should I… come up there?'

He seemed to recognize his cue and lightly jumped down. Raiku tried to repress her immediate instinct to scream and run, but even two years of exposure to Yamada weren't making that easy. She covered the twitching with a characteristically graceful recoil. He was standing too close. Three meters away was  _too close_.

He straightened. He was very tall. Taller than her, even, which her first two teachers had not been. His hair was even  _taller_  and he was at least twice as wide as she was. This was made no less obvious when he slouched a little and put his hands in his pockets, probably sensing her distress and assuming he was intimidating her. It didn't help.

He creased his visible eye at her. She did the same, though her unease must have been obvious due to her every other feature screaming how uneasy she was. Now that she thought about it, that must have been a dead giveaway.

After a few more awkward minutes, she tried to move things along. 'Did… you get my file?'

'Nope,' he shrugged, still looking cheerful. 'So. You can't use chakra.'

Raiku squinted. It sounded like a question, but it had been phrased as a statement? Was she supposed to answer? She had better answer anyway, just in case. 'I… No, I can't?'

He tilted his head back to look at the sky after a few more minutes of scrutiny that made Raiku feel about as safe as a human being in horrible danger.

Oh god. Even her metaphors were in emergency shut-down.

She had been sweating and lethargic from the heat and too much time in direct sunlight in too many layers, but now she was shaking from nervousness. Raiku knew that she had to keep it toned down; it made sense for her to be intimidated by, or even slightly frightened of the famous Hatake Kakashi, but for her to display this level of terror couldn't be so easily excused. She had to restrain herself, she had to stay calm.

Kakashi was looking at her again. She was looking at his feet, but she knew that he was. She could feel it, could feel the weight of that gaze that saw  _too much_. Tsunade knew about this, and now Hatake Kakashi had gotten involved. Tsunade may have been more powerful, but Kakashi was a Main Character, and that was so much worse. Why hadn't she felt him coming? He was wearing Plot like a second skin—

Wait. Why hadn't her  _dad_  seen him coming? He was much better at this than her! Raiku glared at Kakashi's feet, which stayed exactly where they were, unsurprisingly. Had her dad seen this coming? He must have. Did that mean that the time-skip would protect her? He had said something about it trying to keep things in place, did that—

'This way.'

Raiku was staring at the ground where Kakashi had been standing for almost a full minute before she realized that he'd walked off. She scrambled to her feet and hurried to catch up, almost slipping where the road turned to the dirt path that led to the training grounds.

'Yamada asked me for advice about you,' Kakashi told her, looking infuriatingly nonchalant for a man whose very presence was a potential disaster.

'What? When?!' she demanded.

He waved a hand vaguely. 'Early on. Not being able to use chakra made shinobi life a bad idea for you.'

Raiku frowned. 'But I am one.'

'It's a bad idea, though.'

Raiku was so stunned by this pleasantly delivered condemnation that she stopped, letting Kakashi walk alone for most of the way up the hill before she managed to process this fully.

'Hey!' she yelped. She sprinted up the hill, the hard training with Yamada fortunately leaving her fit enough to keep her indignant babbling up the whole way. 'It's not like this leaves me with a lot of other options! "Oh hey",' she imitated, '"I'd like to apply to be a florist—ooh, but I can't actually touch flowers or water or sand or anything ever, will that be a problem?"'

'"I'd like to be a shinobi, but I can't use chakra, ever",' Kakashi shot back cheerfully, his tone as mild as if they'd been discussing the weather, rather than Raiku's terrible life choices.

'But, I-,' Raiku broke off, frustrated with her own inability to defend her decision. He was right. It was a huge disadvantage, and she'd be struggling with it her whole life. But…

She hunched her shoulders and didn't continue. She felt vulnerable and the morning had put her on edge already. Saying anything else would just be fodder for the Genematrix, which would play directly into its _inky little hands_.

This left them walking in silence for a while. Kakashi seemed to just be enjoying the nice weather. The bastard.

After a while, they moved past the more frequently used training fields, currently full of students getting patiently coached through not stabbing themselves. Raiku had needed several iterations of that lesson. Memories.

Her fond remembrance of her father's mournful expression distracted her until she found herself standing in a rather overgrown clearing. The grass came up to almost her knees, and the gouges and burns on the trees that surrounded all training grounds looked old.

Oh god. He'd taken her to the outer and sketchier training grounds so that he could kill her.

No, she told herself sternly; that would be ridiculous. Shizune would never hand her over to be killed.

Well, she probably deserved it, actually, now that it had come up— _not helping, brain_!

Kakashi turned around to face her, pulling his hands out of his pockets to hand by his sides.

Raiku hovered at the edge of the clearing, wishing that the four meters between them could be multiplied by some large, large number.

'So… training,' she drew out slowly, eyes flicking over everything around them so that she could avoid looking at him for as long as possible.

She saw Kakashi nod in her peripheral vision and shift slightly, and then she was screaming and hurling herself to the side to dodge the kunai he threw her way.

Oh god he had  _attacked her_ she was gonna  _die—_

Raiku scrambled halfway up the nearest tree and jumped from one of its branches, back towards where she could feel the electrical currents of Konoha. She could feel power surging, knew she was already crackling and glowing white-blue from fear and the immediate rush of adrenaline. None of which was going to help her escape him, not that—

Raiku threw herself down against a branch to avoid another attack, the reactionary surge of power leaving the wood blackened and crumbling.

'I knew it!' she shrieked, sending a pulse of power out in the direction she thought he was coming from, just out of fear, with no real hope that it would hit. Predictably, Kakashi easily jumped out of the way and vanished, reappearing within her personal space in the same breath. She jumped again, narrowly missing a punch that would have broken something vital in her face, electricity flaring again and forcing him to disappear before it connected.

Raiku stood on the branch, panting and looking around desperately to try and see where he was. Her short-lived retreat had taken them out of the clearing and into the surrounding trees, the foliage so thick that only dappled and shifting sunlight was getting through. The shadows cast by the leaves blown roughly in the wind seemed far more ominous than they had a moment ago, each one a potential place for him to attack her from.

Focus. She had to focus. She had to figure out where he was and then run  _as_   _far away from there as possible_.

Oh god, it was hopeless. He was faster than her, stronger than her, smarter than her and much more important to the Genematrix than she was, there was no way she could win—no, Raiku! She pulled herself up and concentrated intently. She had to focus!

When focused, her chakra senses told her exactly… nothing.

The temptation to despair made itself known again, but that was never helpful. Much like her chakra senses. But without being able to see or hear Kakashi, or sense him, there was no way for her to have any warning… whatsoever…

Wait.

Raiku's chakra sensing ability was, frankly, appalling, but shinobi were almost universally indicated by two things: chakra and weapons. Weapons that were usually made of metal. Raiku's breathing slowed as she threw her senses out again, ignoring the chakra and focusing instead on another.

Electricity. There was electricity somewhere to her right, and that had to be Konoha, had to be the electrical systems that lived in it.

Metal. Konoha was warping her sense of where it was due to its sheer concentration, in the buildings and the metal that surrounded almost every shinobi. It drew her in, the tempting lure of conductors.

Like the ones directly above her.

The bolt of electricity she sent hurtling upwards was almost as wide as she was and the resulting  _boom_  made birds scatter from the trees in the forest around them. The clap of thunder, the flapping wings and shrill cries hopefully obscured any sound she produced when she made a mad break for it. She leapt from tree branch to tree branch, the charged air around her leaving scorch marks on the branches that it didn't outright obliterate. She was too aware of her breathing, she was too focused on making sure she still was drawing breath to really run, to really let herself go and get out of there as fast as possible. Time was slowing down, it was making each jump feel sluggish and her limbs seemed to move so slowly that they were almost unresponsive to her desperate instructions.

Kakashi had no such problem.

Something hit her back, hard, sending her crashing through branches until she rolled to a halt on the forest floor, just managing to bring her arms up in time to protect herself from…

Nothing.

After an eternity spent with her eyes screwed shut and her arms held up, Raiku cautiously creaked an eyelid open.

Kakashi was standing over her, one foot planted on either side of her thin torso. He was holding a kunai, but the hand it was in was at his side, just like the other one. He had his head tilted, and he didn't look grim, or threatening, or anything like she would expect of someone to who was about to kill her.

He just looked calm.

Actually, he looked like he was saying something. Raiku muddled her way through the shock to try and make out what he was saying through the sound of her heart pounding desperately in her ears.

'How did you know where I was?' he asked, with the slow cadence of someone who'd asked the same question a few times.

Raiku stared. '…What?'

'You can't develop your chakra abilities,' he said, as though she needed reminding. 'How did you know where I was?'

Raiku continued to stare.

He tilted his head the other, looking down at her with what seemed to be a rather critical curiosity.

'Metal,' she managed, willing herself not to blink and miss the killing blow, though each second that ticked past made her less sure she understood what was going on. 'I can feel the metal on you.'

Kakashi's eye narrowed slightly. Under his scrutiny, she felt remarkably like a bug with a pin through it. Trapped, squirming, so on.

'Conductors,' she added, when this failed to provoke a response. 'I can feel conductors! Everywhere. And, and electricity! Trees are bad. I can't feel them much. Sand?! Sand is also-,'

Kakashi cut her increasingly panicked babbling off with a hand wave. It had been especially effective since he'd used the hand that  _still had a knife in it_.

If he noticed her sudden fear-paralysis, he didn't seem to feel particularly bad about it. 'We can use that,' he said, stepping off to one side to let her up.

Raiku continued to lie on the ground, flat on her back and completely baffled.

Kakashi nudged her with his foot. 'Get up.'

Raiku lamented. How was this her life?

Kakashi crouched down when she continued to wait for death. This brought their faces frighteningly close together. Less than a meter. Oh god he was so obviously good-looking under there, she hated him and his photogenic features  _so much_. His one visible eye was amused, but in a strange way. Actually, it looked a lot like …

Oh god, she was such an idiot, and apparently they both knew it.

'You're not normal,' Kakashi told her. Raiku frowned up at him, but he didn't seem particularly impressed by the majesty of her displeasure, continuing on. 'This isn't chakra-based, so you don't need an electrical technique user.'

Raiku's frown only became more intense. 'You couldn't have told Shizune that?'

He smiled. Maybe. She couldn't tell if he was smiling or just faking it with his eye. Was this how people felt around her? It was awful. 'The only way to learn is through experience.'

Raiku blinked. '…If that's true,' she said slowly, puzzling through this, 'why are you here? Why don't you just tell Shizune that and go?'

Please go, she begged silently.

'Because I'm the only person who agreed to help you get that experience,' Kakashi told her, and her heart sank. He took in her expression of utter horror and stood. 'So. Again.'

Raiku reluctantly pulled herself up and he took a few steps back, settling into a relaxed stance that was absolutely not going to fool her again. 'You should focus on that sense,' he advised. 'It's a good start.'

Raiku honed in on the conductors trying to pull her into themselves, and wondered if she could fall into them and away before he noticed.

No, she decided, as Kakashi settled into a stillness that made her afraid on some primal level. Probably not.

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Raiku,_

_Thank you. My team passed at the same time as Gaara of the Sand, and so we and the other new Chuunin have been largely overlooked. It's reasonable. He is extremely dangerous, and our village's strongest shinobi. It's nice to have the achievement of passing recognized by someone other than my little brother, but that's probably stupid. It is immature and conceited to require praise from other people, but I don't think I actually require it. I am just grateful. I don't mind excessive punctuation. Thank you. I hope you will enter the Exam next time, if you are ready. It sounds like your training is going well, so I think you will be. I hope so. Writing to a younger, foreign Genin is considered strange when you are a Chuunin. I will still write, though. Because we are friends, and it is not presumptuous to say so._

_I did not understand the rest of the letter. You have been a teenager for over a year. I think I missed a vital part._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

Given narrative form and humorous irony, both of which Raiku was well aware of, the events of the warm spring morning that followed her first day of training shouldn't have been as surprising as they were.

Raiku woke late. Sustained emotional trauma from proximity to the Copy-nin tended to have that effect. She dozed for a while until hunger drove her out of bed, not bothering to get changed out of her pajamas. She yawned widely and repeatedly, trying to blink herself awake on the stumbling journey down the stairs and into the kitchen in a bleary and sleep-muddled quest for something edible.

'Good morning.'

'Good morning,' she mumbled, one hand coming up to rub her eyes and the other searching the cupboard.

Raiku was sitting at the counter with a mouth full of dry cereal before Tsunade's presence really penetrated her sleepy haze.

Tsunade was giving the cereal box a critical look. 'You were supposed to be on a high-protein, high-calorie diet.' She turned that gaze on to Raiku. 'Did your father not tell you?'

Raiku stared at her, frozen. The cereal in her mouth was quickly absorbing all the moisture there and there was a very real chance that she could choke on it and die. But she couldn't count on that. She should have made some poisoned back-up cereal.

Tsunade was in her house again.

Again!

_Again?_

How was this happening  _again?!_

'… My dad?' she got out, once she'd managed to chew and swallow without embarrassing herself.

Tsunade smiled a little. It didn't reach her eyes. 'He's been very cooperative.'

'And you are here because… he is cooperating,' Raiku guessed, unwilling to blink in case a second Tsunade appeared. Unlikely, yes, but this one had come out of nowhere so she wasn't willing to risk it.

Tsunade nodded. The table in front of her folded hands was conspicuously bare when her amber eyes flicked down to it and then back to Raiku. Raiku blanched and lurched off her stool, already reaching for the kettle. 'Would you like some tea?!' That's right, Raiku, she berated herself. Have the Hokage in your kitchen and not even offer her a drink.  _Well done._

Her father beat her to it, leaning past to flick it on. 'I've got it. Good morning!'

Raiku turned so that Tsunade couldn't see her face and she was looking directly at him. Slowly, deliberately, she narrowed her eyes at him and silently promised revenge.

He smiled at her. He was playing host for the Hokage, and not for the first time. He wasn't intimidated at all. 'You slept late! Tired from yesterday?'

That bastard. He knew  _damn well_  that she was tired from yesterday! She'd staggered in through the front door and collapsed on the shoe cupboard, muttering darkly about stupid Kakashi and his stupid skills and his stupid hair and his stupid being-better-at-everything-ness.

'Yep.'

He ruffled her hair, an action so habitual that he didn't even have to concentrate to avoid electrocuting himself. 'Good to see you training hard. The Hokage has just come by to check up on the family and all that.'

What.

_What._

'Is… Is this a  _social call_?' Raiku asked incredulously, stepping back so that she could look between them. Tsunade didn't look like someone there to socialize. She looked like a large, carnivorous fish might when faced with a variety of small, herbivorous ones, after having already eaten. Entertained. Slightly speculative. Completely aware of its ability to  _kill and eat everything present._

'Oh, sort of,' her father said unhelpfully. He was looking … put together. He didn't have any ink on his shirt, or on the side of his face. His hands were still slightly marked with that blackness, but he … his hair had been cut. His eyes seemed particularly distant, his smile particularly mild. In other words, all of his potential attractors for Drama had been carefully managed. These were all signs of this meeting having been arranged significantly ahead of time.

And he hadn't  _warned her_?!

'It's important to keep up with the goings-on in all the clans in Konoha,' Tsunade filled in, one immaculate fingernail tapping the tabletop.

'We aren't a clan?!' Raiku more demanded than asserted, turning back to her father.

'Well, no,' he said, pulling a mug out of the cupboard. 'Of course not. But we  _are_  a pretty large family and we do all live in one place, so we've been talking occasionally. Hokage-sama, would you like green or white tea?' he asked over Raiku's head. Mostly over her head. She came up to just over his chin now, while her hair was higher than his nose, in parts. So sort of half above and half around her head, really.

'Green.'

Occasionally?

They had done this  _before_?!

Raiku dragged her dad out of the kitchen with some flimsy excuse tossed over her shoulder, closing the door behind her.

'What the hell are you doing?!' she hissed, trying to both keep Tsunade from overhearing and convey her displeasure at the same time.

Her father straightened his shirt, pulled out of place by her determined grip. 'This is to be expected, Raiku,' he reminded her. 'We drew a lot of attention to ourselves.'

It was generous of him to say they had all done it, rather than just her. But still. 'Having  _tea_  with the  _Hokage_!?'

He waved a hand dismissively. 'The time-skip stops any narrative leakage from Naruto. Without that unpredictable factor, any Character influence of hers is predictable. And avoidable,' he added, gesturing to his Drama-immune new haircut.

Raiku stared.

'Okay,' she said eventually, 'but you do understand that she is  _the boss of everyone_!?'

Her father put a heavy hand on her head, shaking his own. 'Raiku. We've been doing this for a very long time. We'll steer things back to normal, so just leave it be.'

His tone was firm. It was very specifically the one he used as the head of their family, and not the warmer one of her father.

Raiku frowned. She couldn't do anything. He was in charge and he'd put his foot down.

But, she thought, as he reopened the kitchen door and resumed talking to Tsunade as if their little interlude had never happened; but.

Surely it couldn't be that simple?

 

 

 

 

 

_[Card: Desk drawer in Sand: extremely crumpled]_

_[Front of card: a cartoon tree frog in a green vest smiling widely]_

_Congratulations on becoming Chuunin! We're all_  green _with envy!_

_[Inside of card]_

_Gaara! No. Gaara. Wait. Gaara of the Sand. … ! Congratulations on becoming a Chuunin! Well done! This card is not meant to imply that it's a surprise or anything like that I just thought it was customary to congratulate people and found out you had passed from another friend of mine CONGRATULATIONS from Raiku obviously only I would do something this completely insaSTOP Raiku WHY_

_[Back of card]_

_what am i doiiiiing_

 

 

 

 

 

'Alright then!'

Daisukenojo put his hands on his hips, feet set at a combat-ready hip-width apart in front of Raiku's father and Yamada, a blackboard behind him.

On it was written "OPERATION: MSRRNNTTBHP".

'What is Operation… Muhsurrntobup?' Gairano tried, one eyebrow raised. 'And, more importantly, why are you in my house?'

'Operation: "Make Sure Raiku and Ryuu Never Notice That They've Both Hit Puberty",' Daisukenojo corrected, and suddenly Gairano stopped looking curious.

'I see,' he said grimly.

Yamada glared from where he sat awkwardly crammed into a seat that was far too small. "You are never coming up with an operation name again, get me?"

'Hey! Focus!' Daisukenojo snapped. He continued before Yamada could do more than look suitably enraged, whipping out a kunai to point it at the blackboard. 'I want to hear ideas!'

"For what?!" Yamada demanded, visibly seething with anger. "They barely even like each other!"

'Yeah, and Ryuu's gotten super hot recently!' Daisukenojo retorted.

Yamada raised his eyebrows.

Daisukenojo realized what he had said and turned bright red. 'That—that is not what I meant! Objectively speaking! He's gotten… older-looking!' he sputtered.

Yamada's eyebrows only crept higher.

Daisukenojo went, if it was possible, even redder. 'Shut up! Oh my god, shut up! People I know told me that he was! … Lady-people that I know!' he added hastily.

"So there's that," Yamada said eventually, when Daisukenojo's pathetic flailing had died down a bit. "Only she wears a mask and can't touch anybody-,"

Gairano stretched out and touched his arm lightly, not looking away from the blackboard. 'Yamada. Let him finish.'

Yamada shot him a disbelieving look. "Gairano, you can't be serious."

Gairano looked serious.

Yamada sighed in disgust. "Look, idiot," he said to Daisukenojo patronisingly, because he could hardly expect a Gairano to be reasonable. "Raiku and Ryuu are not gonna start liking each other just 'cause one of them got all sparkly. Even if she liked him, we don't even know what she looks like as someone 'older-looking', get me?"

Daisukenojo narrowed his eyes. 'Oh really? You don't think that Ryuu the  _super-duper-sadist_  is gonna be interested in someone who can, oh, I don't know, make lightning storms with him?'

Yamada opened his mouth to speak, then paused and frowned.

'Or,' Daisukenojo continued relentlessly, 'someone who is also the only female he spends any of his time with while his hormones are going out of control? Who doesn't seem to think he's attractive and who he can't touch? Combined with how he's psychotically competitive and takes everything as a challenge?'

"You're worse than he is," Yamada pointed out, but he seemed less convinced of his position.

Daisukenojo smirked, sensing his victory. 'Someone who is both very destructively enabled and,' he went in for the killing blow,  _'highly suggestible_?'

There was a long silence.

'I think we should kill him,' Gairano suggested mildly.

Yamada threw his hands up. "We're not gonna kill him!"

Gairano shrugged. 'Just a thought. Just throwing it out there.'

Daisukenojo obligingly picked up a piece of chalk and wrote "Kill Ryuu" as an option on their new mind-map.

Gairano smiled serenely. Yamada sighed. "So we need a plan," he agreed, with an expression that promised both of them a world of pain if anyone heard of his involvement. "I still think it's a stupid goddamn name."

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Iwao,_

_Congratulations again, then! How is being a Chuunin? Is everything more terrifying? Things are mostly the same here. Some people that we know made Chuunin as well, so our graduating class has splintered a little. It makes it much harder to avoid people when they don't move in groups of threes. But, anyway! It's quite warm here, now, which I don't like so much. I can deal with the cold, you know? Because I don't feel it, ever. I think I felt it when I was sick? It was awful. Wait. I am complaining to someone in the desert about heat. Oh god. Why am I still so bad at this?_

_I am being trained by a second teacher, now! He has his own group of three, but they are all basically on loan to other people. Well, one definitely is. And so is the other, ninety percent of the time. He was never that interested in the third, she told me? Maybe that part was not true. She was pretty angry when she said that. I only see her sometimes. Maybe she's like that all the time? ANYWAY. He has his own team and we train every couple of days. His training is just to beat me up. But I think it is a little harder to beat me up now, compared to a few weeks ago? Slightly harder? Maybe a fraction? A fraction of a fraction, certainly. I still don't think he finds it very difficult, but I am learning a lot! Mostly about running. Yamada is still training me, and I'm improving! I am actually not that bad at some things! And terrible at others. So I'm not sure about the exam._

_I'm sorry my letter is so weird, weirder than usual, I am super tired. You can't be annoyed! We are friends!_

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku collapsed onto the clothing rack and let out an unhappy whining sound. The rack was her friend. It was her pal and it camouflaged her nicely.

Her father pulled her up by the back of her vest. 'Oh, don't even think about it. We just need to … find someone,' he told her firmly, 'who … can tell us what to do.'

Raiku flicked two coat-hangers together. 'This is the worst. And you are the worst.'

He glared at her. This was an impressive feat, since he was determined not to look at any of the women in the store, even peripherally, and they were starting to close in. Well, the older women were. All the women of a certain demographic were starting to close in. Raiku, who had no idea how to deal with women at the best of times, was feeling similarly threatened.

He almost lunged for the sales assistant when he saw her moving stealthily between the racks. 'You! Yes! Hello!'

Raiku covered her eyes with her hand, because her dad. Her dad. This had the added bonus of making her unable to see the thousands of bras that surrounded her.

Staring at her.

 _Judging her_.

Raiku hunched slightly at the thought of them. They were there.  _Waiting_. A thousand cloth-y (or, more terrifyingly, leather-and-miscellaneous-y) reminders that she had  _no idea how to female._  Not a verb, traditionally, but it was the best way to describe it. She had been totally unprepared. She had had no idea that these things had sizes different to clothes. Her dad hadn't either.

And so, their current predicament.

'Raiku?' Her dad had successfully wrangled the sales assistant into assisting. No small feat, since she had taken one look at their obvious shinobi attire and run for the hills.

The woman smiled at her. Sort of. There was no real warmth there, but it certainly implied that she was willing to help her out. 'I understand you need a fitting?'

Raiku nodded, grateful that her mask made her blush almost impossible to detect.

The woman immediately looked at her chest.

Raiku immediately wrapped her arms around herself.

The woman sighed. It was the sigh of someone who was used to highly awkward teenage girls objecting to being manhandled by another female, and who could recognize the signs of that being about to happen.

'This is your first bra?'

Raiku shrunk back, keeping her eyes safely on one of the approaching enemy bras. Well, not approaching, but certainly looming in a malevolent way. '…Yes.'

'If you'll just come to the change room, we can do a fitting for you.'

'Over the clothes,' her father added.

The sales assistant seemed to restrain another sigh. 'If that would make you more comfortable.'

'It would! It would,' Raiku hastened to assure her, and was promptly steered towards the back. The women who had been slowly migrating towards them seemed to find this whole thing precious. They'd taken notice the second she'd come in with her dad, and had given off various signs of being increasingly charmed by her dad's awkward attempts to help his daughter through this milestone. Especially, Raiku thought gloomily, since it basically spelled out the lack of a mother in the picture.

One made an audible, but quiet, "aw" sound when Raiku made a pleading look at her father over her shoulder. He was no help. He was starting to look stressed, in his own way. For most people this was pretty standard. For her father, it meant that his gaze was distant, his smile more fixed. He looked a bit like a space cadet at that moment, so he was clearly feeling a bit threatened.

Good. He deserved it for throwing her to the mercy of some… pitiless monster who was hired to help her. Raiku backed away from the assistant once they reached the change room.

'Take off your vest,' the older woman instructed, pulling the curtain closed.

Raiku cringed. Oh god. This could only end badly.

 

 

 

 

 

_Thank you._

Raiku turned the otherwise blank piece of paper over in her hands, looking for some sort of clue as to the sender. It was certainly very... to the point. It had arrived in the mail a few days earlier, with nothing but a stamp that seemed familiar, but that she didn't recognize. And those two words.

She squinted at the handwriting. It wasn't familiar.

Shrugging, she opened the drawer she kept all of her correspondence in and tossed the letter inside. It slid down the side amongst the more standard letters until it settled somewhere near the bottom, on top of a letter from Iwao, marked with his much neater handwriting and an identical postage stamp.

 

 

 

 

 

Daisukenojo sighed loudly.

When Raiku failed to respond, he did so again. Louder. He also threw his hands up to catch her eye, in case she was tuning him out again.

'What?' she asked, tearing her gaze away from Ryuu's front door.

'Why are we waiting outside?!' he demanded, gesturing. He had been doing that a lot. Talking with his hands seemed to be his thing. 'He has a perfectly good living room!'

Raiku shrugged helplessly, tugging some hair out of her face. As it got longer it got slightly more willing to listen to gravity. Not enough to be fashionably spiky, because  _of course not_ , but enough to make seeing difficult. 'He said we had to wait here!'

Daisukenojo rolled his eyes. Wow, she marvelled. His every movement was emphatic. 'And since when do we listen to him?'

Raiku paused and thought about it. He had a point. Historically, they had never made any effort to listen to Ryuu.

Oh wait.

'Because last time he knocked me out and dragged my bloody corpse out the door?!'

It had not been a good day.

'Yeah, well. Screw it! Screw this, I am going in!' Daisukenojo declared, cracking his knuckles.

Raiku gasped. 'No, Daisuke! It's not worth it!'

'It's a matter of principle! I refuse to do what Ryuu says!'

'Daisukenojo, no!' Raiku cried, trying to pull him back. She was forced to stop when he crossed the property line; if he was going to commit suicide-by-Ryuu, she wasn't going to join him. Not that it stopped her from moving to getter a better angle to see the door from.

Daisukenojo stalked up the path and then knocked on the door. He turned to look at Raiku over his shoulder when this provoked no murderous aura from Ryuu's window, raising his eyebrows.  _See?_

Raiku shook her head, eyes wide.  _I see only your impending doom._

Daisukenojo huffed and turned back to wait. After a moment it opened, and they saw the face of their destruction.

She was smiling. 'Hello! Daisukenojo, right?' Ryuu's mother asked warmly. Raiku blatantly stared at her, mouth hanging open.

She looked so ...  _ordinary_. Actually, She could have passed for a Gairano's more normal cousin. She had black hair and brown eyes and she was wearing comfortable, but flattering clothes in shades of blue. Raiku looked her up and down. She had laugh-lines! She had the photogenically lined faced of a soap-opera maternal character. How the hell had this woman raised Ryuu!? She probably baked cookies on the weekends!

'Yes, I am. Nice to meet you,' Daisukenojo said, oddly formal in the way he always was around older women. If he had a hat, Raiku thought, he would have it in his hands. His mother really had trained him well. 'Is Ryuu ready yet?'

She sighed in fond exasperation, waving a hand. 'Oh, not yet. Did he ask you to wait outside?'

'Yes. Yes he did!' Raiku called. Ryuu's mother leaned slightly to the side to look past Daisukenojo and see who had spoken.

Her whole face lit up. 'Oh! You must be Raiku!' she called, waving cheerfully. Raiku leaned back slightly. Her wariness was instinctively triggered by the woman's obvious eagerness. What had Ryuu said about her? Oh god, what had Ryuu  _told_  her?!

Ryuu's mother tsked. 'Don't be shy! What are you waiting over there for?'

Daisukenojo smirked. 'Yeah, Raiku.'

Raiku fidgeted in place, self-consciously tugging at her hair. 'I was... I was just...'

Ryuu's mother laughed, beckoning. 'I've been so looking forward to meeting you! Come inside, both of you,' she invited, stepping to the side to let her in. Daisukenojo ducked his head slightly in thanks and stepped past, vanishing into the house.

Raiku hovered. On the one hand, she was extremely curious. Ryuu had always had a bizarre determination to stop her from meeting his mother. On the other, his mother seemed very happy to see her. Well, she had been happy to see Daisukenojo, but she had been a lot more energetic about Raiku. That was suspicious.

Raiku tentatively stepped onto the path leading up to the front door. She looked up, expecting to see Ryuu bearing down on her immediately.

When this failed to happen, she relaxed slightly and took a few more steps.

'I'm so glad you finally came over; I know Ryuu is a bit of a loner, but I'm so glad he has you two,' his mother was saying as Raiku made her way over. 'And you're so cute! Just look at you, I bet that-,'

Raiku paused mid-step.

Well, that wasn't right. She tried to step and found her entire body frozen in place.

'See you later,' Ryuu said cheerfully to his mother, appearing in the doorway. Daisukenojo was next to him, one of Ryuu's hands on his shoulder and gripping so tightly that the knuckles were white. It looked painful. 'Back for dinner.'

His mother frowned. 'I was just saying hello to your teammates; can't you stay for a little while?'

He shrugged. 'Sorry, we're already late.'

She sighed. 'Well. Next time!' she promised Raiku, an odd glint in her eye.

Raiku tried to open her mouth, but nothing came out. On closer inspection, Ryuu's free hand was hidden behind his back. She bet she knew what it was doing.

She glared at him. Stupid Ryuu with his stupid techniques.

He steered Daisukenojo past her and grabbed her on the way, dragging both of them away by the scruff of the neck until his house couldn't be seen anymore.

'Let go of me, asshole!' Daisukenojo hissed, struggling.

'If that happens again, I'll smother you in your sleep!' Ryuu promised darkly. Evidently his anger had removed his self-imposed syllable limit. 'What did she say to you?!'

Oddly, this seemed to be directed at Raiku.

'Nothing!' she squeaked, using some of the precious little oxygen he was allowing her. 'I heard nothing!'

Ryuu searched her face for a moment and seemed to decide she was telling the truth, because the air around her suddenly resumed normal behaviour.

'Smother you. In your sleep,' he threatened again, before pushing past both of them and briskly walking ahead.

Raiku stared after him.

'What the hell?' Daisukenojo grumbled, rubbing his shoulder. 'What was that?'

Raiku shook her head. 'I don't know.'

He rolled his shoulders to try and get them feeling normal again. 'Shit. Wonder why he doesn't want his mother talking to you?'

'I don't know.' Raiku thudded her fist into her palm. It could be blackmail material. It could be something she could use against him! For once! 'But I intend to find out.'

 

 

 

 

 

_Raiku,_

_Being a Chuunin is just like being a Genin, only slightly harder. Not much, though. That might be because we aren't actively at war right now. I don't know. It's getting very hot here too, obviously. I don't mind extreme temperatures, but I dislike summer here. It's suffocating._

_What is your new teacher's name? Mine is doing well. Well, he was until a few weeks ago. Now that we're all Chuunin, the twins are testing boundaries again. Each time, he has to dominate them pretty brutally or it all spirals out of control. It's an increasingly significant problem. The two of them are still elusive when we're not training, and it's starting to get to me. I might follow one of them, soon. I'm stealthier than they are, but they aren't stupid. I need to think about it carefully. It sometimes makes me wish that I had a team like yours. If I could trust them fully, maybe this wouldn't be a problem._

_I'm sorry. I don't know what else to write about, since all missions above the first two levels aren't allowed to be written about. Sorry._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

The forest was quiet.

 _Too_  quiet—Raiku reached out and snapped a twig. No it wasn't! It was just quiet enough! At the interruption of tension-building language, noise in the forest resumed as usual.

Satisfied that the birds were chirping and the leaves rustling as nature intended, Raiku settled back into her hiding place. It was midday, or thereabouts, and they'd been at this for hours. Or maybe just an hour. The trees were so thick where they were training that the foliage left them largely in gloom. She was tired and hardly inconspicuous at the best of times, so Kakashi had hunted her down at least three times, but she was doing a little better! It was taking all of her concentration and some skills she wasn't too sure about, but she'd evaded him for a while. It was taking its toll, though. Some part of her brain, and she couldn't tell which, was aching. Maybe all of it? She'd almost buried herself inside her conductor sense, trying to find even the barest hints of metal, and it left her with the unsettling feeling of being both inside and outside of her body all at once.

It wasn't the only problem. Tragically, Kakashi had decided that he'd been making it too easy for her and so when trying to help her develop this skill, he removed everything she could easily sense. This hadn't yet included his forehead protector, which she had been successfully honing in on to avoid him, until he'd gone and done this.

_This._

Raiku muffled a groan and pressed her hands to her temples as though she could use them to force her thoughts into better order. He'd done something and now she felt pulled in all directions, instead of just towards him. It had gone from nothing to almost overwhelming and she couldn't focus. She knew that whatever he'd done, it had to involve decoys. But how could he have hidden so many conductors on him without her sensing them on their way there? And there were so many of them. It was impossible.

She shook her head slightly and refocused. She had to find out what he was doing. She couldn't get past them and if she couldn't get past them then she couldn't sense him. The day wasn't over until she'd evaded him for three hours, and she wouldn't put it past him to force her to stay in the woods for days. By the time she got out, she would be a hollow husk of a person, riddled with PTSD and a chronic fear of deep male voices! And she would have  _missed dinner_.

Unacceptable. She had to figure out what he was using.

Raiku edged out from her makeshift cover, pushing a leafy branch aside to peer through the gloom. A bird chirped at her, no doubt pointing out to all its little feathery buddies the presence of a totally obvious hiding place. Smug bastard.

After a few seconds of no movement, she shifted onto the branch more securely and out of the hollow she'd been crouching in. Right. He was probably setting a trap, or several traps, or all of the traps, so she seemed to have a window of time. The nearest... whatever it was, was almost a half-kilometer away, roughly. She was learning to feel for things more sensitively, but the sense was more of an instinctive pull in the direction of attractive conductors than it was a mental radar. Still, since it was effectively a less useful replacement for a chakra sense, she'd spent most of her time learning how to make mostly-accurate guesses.

She couldn't tell if it was at ground level or above. She was going to have to wing it. She braced herself to jump.

'I can see your eyes glowing.'

Raiku shrieked and flailed, losing balance on the branch and only saving herself from plummeting to the forest floor by wrapping herself around the branch like a koala. Kakashi crouched a little further along, eye creased at her and head tilted to one side. 'It's a dead giveaway.' He tapped a kunai on the branch meaningfully. 'Potentially.'

Raiku hoped he couldn't see how her jaw was clenched under her mask. He'd taken to startling her on purpose, ostensibly to desensitize her so that she wouldn't give herself away if she was surprised on a mission. He seemed to enjoy it too much. She'd been on edge since they started for that very reason, and her shock at his sudden appearance had morphed immediately into anger that she was trying to supress as quickly as possible.

If he did notice, he didn't let it bother him. He stood.

'Again.'

He vanished.

Raiku took a few calming breaths. She'd only have a few minutes as a headstart, and she needed to use those minutes wisely.

She released the branch and twisted to land on one below, jumping in the direction of the nearest conductor. She had to know. He'd set them up everywhere and  _she had to know how_.

The closer she got, however, the more confused she became. It wasn't something special. It was...

Raiku came to a halt, hovering several metres above a narrow but extremely deep well of water.

She couldn't quite believe what she was seeing. What the hell?

Momentarily forgetting the point of the exercise, she dropped lightly to the forest floor and approached it. It didn't seem altered. It maybe had a slightly higher mineral content, based on its slightly more potent lure, conductor-wise, but nothing too noticeable.

What. The hell?

Raiku was still staring at it uncomprehendingly when Kakashi reappeared.

'Why did it get stronger?' she asked, holding a hand above the water, close enough that her skin's glow was visible through the seams of her glove. 'I don't get it. You must have used dozens of these, and there's some extra metal in there, but how did you do that bit?'

Kakashi stuck his hands in his pockets. 'Guess.'

She risked a glance at him. He was giving her an assessing look. She turned her bewildered attentions back to the water. Why would it have started out as a poor conductor? Had he used an insulator of some kind?

No, she decided. There were too many. He wouldn't have had time to keep going back to gradually remove them.

She scratched her head. Water slowly becoming a conductor—

Raiku groaned and covered her eyes. Of course.

'Got it?' Kakashi asked.

'You just spiked the ground with huge things of ice!' she accused, whirling around to face him. 'Ice is an insulator, and the impact compressed the earth around them so they didn't just drain away and then they melted into conductors!'

A long silence. Raiku stared at him and became less certain of herself by the second. Wasn't ice an insulator?! No, it was! Where had she gone wrong, had she gone wrong?! Why wasn't he saying anything—

'Yep,' Kakashi confirmed.

'I knew it!' Raiku cried in an extremely triumphant lie, punching the air. 'I'm a genius!'

But wait. That still didn't...

'Why did it get so hard to focus?' She looked around suspiciously. 'How many of these are there?'

Kakashi shrugged. So, probably a million. And then he smiled, which immediately made her recoil. 'Hey.'

'...Yes?' she asked, still half-grinning and elated from her tiny victory.

Kakashi leaned forward into her personal space, Raiku too trapped by his gaze to even cower away. 'Again.'

'But I figured it out,' Raiku protested uncertainly, bending so far backwards to get away that her spine creaked perilously.

Kakashi managed to somehow look even more malevolently cheerful. 'But I found you.'

Raiku gaped. 'Come on!'

Kakashi was pitiless. 'Again.'

Raiku sighed, shoulders slumping. What was it about her that attracted sadists?

 

 

 

 

 

_Iwao,_

_Hello! I hope the heat isn't getting to you too badly. I hate it, because all the layers makes it really, really hard to stay cool and my training hasn't helped me find a way around that yet. Oh well! It's not so bad I guess. People think I'm mysterious instead of weird, now that I'm training with the Copy-nin! That is the name of my teacher. Wait, "Copy-nin" isn't his name, his name is Hatake Kakashi, but. That's who he is. He's kind of nice! In a really violent and I'm-not-that-invested kind of way. It's helping! I think. No, it definitely is. Since I can't use my abilities in normal training, being able to use them regularly in a shinobi context is really, really helping! I think I'm improving!_

_Your team situation sounds... kind of unpleasant. Please don't be offended! I don't mean that your team is terrible, I don't! Really! You were all... very effective! If you're really worried about them, just don't get caught following them! If they hate each other so much, you don't want them to hate you too! Ryuu and Daisukenojo followed me once, but I wasn't very offended. Wait.  
_

_Why wasn't I offended!? Oh my god, they followed me! And our teacher! How could they do that I don't even_

_Not important! I don't mind if you don't write much!_

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

It wasn't fair.

Raiku felt the injustice of it down to her  _soul_.

Puberty had happened to Raiku. It was continuing to happen to her with what she felt was extreme prejudice, leaving her as graceful as a legless squirrel. Even with the time-skip  _supposedly_ making things go smoothly, she got the feeling it was failing to compensate for the sheer awfulness of this entire process. It had taken her over a year to gain enough weight to look like she wasn't being starved to death, and even that was still a struggle, but oh no! Not Ryuu!

Ryuu had  _happened_  to puberty. Sure, for a while he'd been slightly gangly and his voice had been… frankly hilarious, but then this had happened. And while he was still slightly gangly and his voice was still not settled, there was nothing hilarious about this.

Raiku eyed his hair.

Ryuu was getting  _shiny_.

It wasn't his fault; she knew that, intellectually. His tragic backstory and inconsistently low-to-high Drama rating made it inevitable, were always going to make him not only physically attractive, but also magnetic in a distinctly … Genematrix way. But she still kind of wanted to smother him in his sleep.

She sometimes worried that made her a bad teammate.

He and Daisukenojo were sparring and she was waiting for her turn, and it was looking more and more like Daisukenojo was going to be the one she was pitted against. Ryuu's medic training was getting more intense and leaving him exhausted from late nights and hard work, and it was showing itself particularly during this training session.

She was proven right a few seconds later when Daisukenojo sent Ryuu flying with a well-placed kick and pinned him almost immediately after landing, to Yamada's great amusement. Helping Ryuu up was never a smart idea when you'd been the one to knock him down, so Daisukenojo wandered off in the other direction to wave at a distant, but distinctly feminine, figure, as Ryuu clambered to his feet.

Raiku watched this with a sigh and stood. Daisukenojo had a talent for harbouring multiple crushes at once, which seemed to be causality's way of balancing her talent for failing to harbour any. It was slightly tiresome.

Raiku caught herself staring at the line of Ryuu's throat (sternocleidomastoid, her mind offered unhelpfully) when he tilted his head back to take a long swig of water. She realized what she had been doing and promptly decided that that day was as good a day to die as any.

'What the hell is wrong with you?!'

'I don't want to live in a world where this has happened!' Raiku wailed, struggling against Daisukenojo's grip on her arms, where it was stopping her from successfully ending her own life. 'This is the only way!'

'What?! Where what's happened?! You son of a bitch, she's already freaking out, so could you stop trying to murder her with your eyes?!'

Ryuu rolled his eyes and took a single step towards them, only for Raiku to hurl herself backwards against Daisukenojo's hold. 'Stay back! Demon! I'd rather die!'

Ryuu carefully put down his bottle of water.

Seconds later, Raiku's protests reached new levels of pitch and volume. Daisukenojo's attempts to restrain her had morphed into a more unified effort to drag her away from Ryuu, while Yamada took in the subsequent conflict with an air of deep and abiding disappointment.

 

 

 

 

_Chapter 3: We All Remember What It Was Like To Be Your Age (This Doesn't Need To Be Hard)_

_So. You've decided to do something, probably something extremely unwise, and your parent/guardian/clan head has told you not to. Intolerable. Unjust. Life is hard, isn't it?_

_No, it isn't. Accept this now. Do you see how I pretended to understand you and then betrayed your newly-gained trust? This is an important thing to remember, later on. I know; you will be experiencing the powerful urge to slam doors and sulk, maybe for days on end, but this can be avoided if you just do the smart thing and SHUT UP. That is, S.H.U.T U.P.: Save Humiliation and Usurp The Unfit Parties._

_Allow me to explain. You are faced with a choice, and the first option is this: you can angst about this in an unproductive waste of your potentially valuable time, making everyone in your family benefit greatly from laughing at your expense. The second is that you can put your dedicated hours of self-worship to use and start learning how to best make the system fit your needs. You won't be able to put any plans you have to usurp the current authority into practice for some time, naturally. But by the time you are an adult and thus, an actual person, you will have the advantage over your peers, whose own adolescence will have been wasted by pursuing romance and staring into mirrors. This has the added bonus of getting you out of everyone's way long enough for you to hopefully realize the truly staggering extent of your own self-involvement, gaining some perspective, as well as greatly adding to your undoubtedly lackluster problem-solving techniques._

_So when in doubt or enraged, S.H.U.T. U.P._

_Also, shut up. This is getting out of hand and we're all, frankly, about to lose patience with [continued on next page]_

 

 

 

 

 

She didn't get it.

Raiku watched Sakura and Lee from her seat on the other side of her father. He was muttering darkly about how Sakura didn't even  _like_  udon and now none of the other Gairano were going to show up to dinner, and she was watching them and feeling hopelessly lost.

Sakura looked different.

That was an obvious inevitability, but Raiku felt as though something about Sakura was different, something fundamental in her that had nothing to do with her height or how long her hair was getting. She just…

She just looked different. Lee did too.

Raiku tilted her head, studying them.

It had to be something. Maybe it was the way they carried themselves? She subconsciously straightened slightly, her shoulders settling down and back as she considered. Sakura didn't seem to lean so noticeably towards the person she was speaking to. Lee sat fully on the seat, instead of just on the edge closest to the person he was speaking to. They seemed more grounded. Maybe it was that?

But no, she decided. It wasn't that.

Her father had stopped talking, but she barely registered his sudden silence.

Confidence? Sakura had never been deferential, as far as Raiku had seen in her admittedly limited experience, but she seemed to laugh louder, more at ease in her space. Then again, Sakura was with a friend, and not some scrawny weirdo she only really spent brief bursts of time with.

She just couldn't figure it out.

She didn't  _get_  it.

Raiku felt the familiar stirring of frustration at the back of her mind. She didn't like it. She didn't like missing things. She just couldn't put her finger on it, but Sakura looked ... older, somehow. Not much, only a little, but she seemed... to be growing up, slowly.

It was a stupid thought, but something about it was sticking in Raiku's mind. Of course she was growing up. Of course Lee was growing up. They all were. Raiku had grown up in a much more literal way rather rapidly. She was growing and her body was changing in ways that her family assured her were normal but that she was utterly certain were a horrifying punishment for some unknown crime, but.

Raiku bit the inside of her cheek and tried not to be petty about it, but she couldn't help feeling frustrated. They were growing older, but Raiku felt as though she was the only one not... growing  _up_.

Why did Sakura suddenly get a direction in life? Why was she evolving so steadily into someone else? Why was Lee so much more at ease? What had changed? Had it been some major Plot Development that she hadn't been aware of?

But no, that made no sense. These were small changes, small changes that were stacking up over time, not grand revelations or sudden about-faces. Was Raiku changing, and just unaware of it? She didn't think she was. She didn't feel changed. She didn't feel different. She was just... the same Raiku, in a taller Raiku-shell.

She was startled out of her reverie by her father ruffling her hair. 'Hey. You want to go home and grab some food on the way?' he asked, tilting his head towards Sakura meaningfully.

Raiku blinked and it took her a moment to realize what he meant, since she'd been staring at a Main Character with some pretty terrifying intensity for a while with no ill-effects.

'Right,' she said belatedly. 'Sure.'

Her father smiled, and she responded in kind. He looked at her for a moment too long before he stood up, something searching in his eyes as he silently met her gaze, but he eventually stood and tugged her up as well. 'Right. Let's go.'

Raiku nodded, and tried not to look at either of the two Characters as she left. She just couldn't shake the feeling that she was missing something, that she was missing out on something important.

She just didn't  _get_  it.

 

 

 

 

 

_Raiku,_

_The heat is manageable. But it's tiring, in a way, even though I'm used to it. Some of my missions have been taking me to places like [REDACTED] where it isn't so bad. It's interesting to see other Nations. I hope you can figure out a way to not get heatstroke. Maybe your wind-using teammate can help? Or your teacher. Hatake is extremely famous. He's a genius and incredibly strong. He would be good to learn from, I think. So I'm sure you really are improving. Will you enter the Exams?  
_

_I don't think you're weird._

_It is unpleasant, sometimes. Mostly it is fine. I tried to follow Akihiro, but he's always been stealthier than Akihito and he covered his tracks well. I will try Akihito next, since I don't think Akihiro caught on that I was there. Maybe I should ask Hijino to help, but I don't think he'd approve of this. Your teammates seem to care about you, so maybe you weren't angry because they weren't trying to catch you out? I don't know._

_I've sent some information on some low-level wind techniques that might help you, if you show them to your teammate. They're basic training techniques about wind and temperature, so they'll be easy to learn and aren't classified. You may also want to look into some of the fabrics used in Sand. I don't know much about them, but they seem cooler than other Nation shinobi gear._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

It was a beautiful night. The air was cool and there was a gentle breeze rustling through the trees surrounding Konoha. The night sky was clear and the grassy training grounds gently bathed in moonlight, completing the image of perfect serenity. It was lovely. Romantic, even.

The musical chirping of nearby crickets was interrupted by a loud  _thud_.

'Just leave me here to die,' Raiku groaned into the grass, sweaty, dirty and in some places, bleeding.

Kakashi stood beside her where she lay, staring upwards at the multitude of stars with his trademark mild expression. 'Not bad. Better than last time,' he commented.

Raiku groaned again, unable to do anything but twitch. Every part of her hurt. She hadn't experienced pain this terrible since the first day she'd trained with Yamada. Or the second day she'd trained with Yamada. Or third. That whole week, really. Her lungs were burning and lying face-down wasn't helping her get more oxygen in there, but she couldn't bring herself to roll over.

'You flew for the last hundred metres or so,' Kakashi observed, turning his attention from the sky to the way they'd just came. It was somewhat less picturesque. Any path taken by Raiku when she used her abilities to augment her speed ended up being scorched, but the last part of their trail had been totally obliterated. There were small fires crackling merrily in the ruined, blackened trees that had been casualties, and the earth leading to the site of Raiku's collapse was a furrow, like a meteor had struck.

Kakashi took this in and then turned back to her. 'You lost control.'

'I did,' Raiku agreed, voice heavy with weary resignation. 'I can't keep it up for long. I get caught up.'

Kakashi hummed in agreement. 'And use too much power.'

'I know, I know,' she whined, willing herself to melt into the grass. The grass didn't judge her. The grass didn't accurately catalogue her failings. The grass didn't have broad shoulders or a mysterious gaze. The grass was better than Kakashi in every conceivable way. 'I was fast, though.'

'Very.'

That surprised her. Kakashi was very, very sparing in his praise. He had extremely high standards. Though, Raiku was extremely fast, when she really put her mind to it. For obvious reasons. They were discovering, however, that while she could move at impossible speed for brief bursts, any attempts to sustain that state would inevitably result in her losing her grip on that ability. She left scorchmarks at first, which was an unacceptably easy thing to track her with, and after a while...

Well. What had once been part of the forest spoke for itself. Gairano were going to be out at dawn trying to replant where she'd left trails of destruction everywhere. They would already have been up to do the same for the areas where Sakura was training her augmented strength attempts, though, so it wasn't that bad.

Raiku screwed her eyes shut. Kakashi had been silent for too long. When he was training her, that meant only one thing.

Don't say it, she begged internally. Say anything but that. That word was the worst word in existence.

Kakashi inhaled.

I'll be good, she promised Kakashi, her father and the universe at large. I'll remember to send Thank You cards. I'll never speak of Naruto again. I'll... I'll...

'Again.'

Raiku muffled a scream into the soil.

 

 

 

 

 

_Iwao,_

_I am entering the Chuunin Exams! Apparently. I won't lie: this was not my choice. But Kakashi talked to Yamada who talked to my dad who yelled at Yamada and now I'm in them. No one is happy about this. Except Kakashi and Yamada and my team, who wanted to enter last year. Okay, so I'm not happy about this. But I may stand a chance! I don't know where it's being held this year, so I should probably look into that but maybe I won't die! I'm sorry if I die. I like writing to you and I can't do that if I die, obviously. Sorry. I may be in shock. I am super weird.  
_

_Good luck! Uh. Following your teammates who you suspect of nefarious deeds. Yes. Good. Good luck._

_Thank you for the information! Ryuu took it and I haven't heard any more about it. I'm a little frightened. I mean, Sand is really famous for developing techniques, so even though I know the ones you sent me were so low-level that they could be shared, Ryuu is also really good at developing techniques. On his own. In the dead of night (probably). I'm grateful! And scared._

_I will let you know how my training goes! And if I pass the Exam, assuming I don't die!_

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

Ryuu and Daisukenojo seated either side of her, Raiku took a deep breath. 'We ready for this?' she asked grimly.

In her peripheral vision, she saw Ryuu nod.

'We can do this, guys.'

'We have to stay on our guard,' Ryuu said, nodding again.

'Be strong.' Raiku felt her resolve waver and squared her shoulders. 'We've got to be smart about this. Daisukenojo, plan?'

'...It's a baby,' Daisukenojo said flatly, waving a hand at the toddler seated in a high chair across from them. 'It is  _just_  a baby.'

The toddler smiled at them with all three of her teeth.

Raiku shuddered.

'For the love of god,' Daisukenojo sighed. He stood up and pulled the little girl into his arms, where she made a series of happy sounds that made Raiku want to hide somewhere high up and remote. 'See? She can't even deal with her bladder, let alone us three.'

'So you can take care of her,' Ryuu suggested.

Daisukenojo glared. 'The hell I will. Come on,' he said to Yamada's tiny daughter, 'let's get you some food.'

'I don't think this kitchen stocks  _human souls_!' Raiku called after him as he made his way through the nearby doorway in search of sustenance.

She and Ryuu stared at the doorway Daisukenojo had left through for a moment, waiting for the agonized screams.

When none were produced, they cautiously crept out into the hallway as a unit. Raiku because Yamada had been deeply displeased with Suzuki's idea of getting them to babysit, and who would have been totally enraged if he'd found out that less than the full team had ended up doing it. Ryuu for no discernible reason, except perhaps that he didn't want Daisukenojo to be better than him at something.

When they entered the kitchen, Ryuu walking like he was totally at ease and Raiku sort of skulking, or possibly scuttling until she reached a chair to sit in, they were greeted with the sight of Daisukenojo rummaging through the fridge with his free hand. 'Finally,' he said absently. 'One of you take her while I find something for her to eat.' He straightened and looked at them expectantly.

He was actually sort of attractive, Raiku noticed, largely because the vast majority of her brain had panicked and melted out her ears when they'd been told they were doing this. He was a sort of muscular redhead holding a young... humanoid. Women liked that, didn't they? And he'd been maturing at a normal rate, physically, so his voice was bit deeper and he was growing into his features. A fit and young male redhead holding an infant. In a kitchen. Girls liked that sort of thing, she was pretty sure? Maybe?

While she was puzzling that out, Ryuu had had the Yamada-Spawn forced upon him. This forced Raiku to look at  _him_  instead, and the picture was rather different. Ryuu did not hold the toddler with anywhere near Daisukenojo's ease. He gripped it under the armpits and held it at arm's length.

The two stared at each other.

After a moment of studying Ryuu's sharp features, the toddler reached her hands out. They were sticky. Wait, how were they sticky?! She had just been bathed and she hadn't touched anything! Raiku boggled, unable to wrap her head around the basic toddler gift of being inexplicably sticky at all times, which everyone else simply accepted as fact.

When Ryuu failed to respond appropriately, the little girl stopped smiling. What was her name, even?! Yamada must have said, but Raiku had been too terrified to listen.

Raiku braced herself for tears, but none came. The infant looked deeply displeased. It ...

It was...

Riku drew in a slow, horrified breath as the toddler took on an expression that made it eerily resemble Suzuki. It glared at Ryuu.

Daisukenojo closed the fridge and turned, jerking back slightly. 'Ryuu! What the hell!?'

'What,' Ryuu demanded, not looking away from his weird staring contest with the toddler. 'She started it.'

Daisukenojo pointed. 'Yeah! Because you're bleeding, idiot!'

Ryuu blinked and shifted Yamada's extremely disgruntled hellspawn to sit braced against his hip. He touched a finger of his free hand to the blood gingerly, pulling it back to see and grimacing. 'It's just a nosebleed,' Ryuu dismissed, 'It's nothing.'

Raiku slid her chair out from the table carefully. It still made a conspicuous scraping sound on the tiles. 'Pretty suspicious timing, though.'

Ryuu rolled his eyes. 'Who here is the medic?'

'Medic  _in training_ ,' Raiku corrected. Ryuu was losing patience and the look he sent her could have torn the skin off someone less used to him.

Daisukenojo seemed on edge. 'Do you have a headache?'

Ryuu shrugged with one shoulder. 'A little.'

'But,' Raiku said slowly, eyed glued to the trickle of blood from Ryuu's nose, 'can't Suzuki's family kill people with their minds?'

There was a long, long silence, broken only by the ticking of the kitchen clock.

'Run for it!' Daisukenojo screamed, overturning the table and making for the hallway.

Raiku was close on his heels, the two of them skidding on the polished floorboards and bouncing off the far wall as Ryuu's enraged shouting followed them. 'Should we really leave him there!?' Raiku yelled to Daisukenojo, though it didn't stop her from grabbing her shoes in her sprint out the door. 'What will we tell Yamada!?'

'He died a hero!' Daisukenojo shouted back, dodging a kunai aimed for the back of his head. 'Good luck, Ryuu!'

'You're dead to me!' Ryuu howled from the doorway they had left behind. 'Dead!'

 

 

 

 

 

_Raiku,_

_Please don't die. I am sure you will do well. I know you have a high destructive capacity, and you aren't stupid. You can pass if you are careful and smart about it. Don't die. I think Konoha is hosting its own Exam this year. That would make sense, since it's still recovering from the attack. Or it may be in Tani. I'm not sure. Let me know, and I can tell you about it. If this reaches you before then. I hope it does._

_I've had no luck so far. I think I'm going to tell Hijino, so that he can help me. If he isn't angry. Also, that girl who tried to poison me tried to do the same to him, and I think they went on a date? I don't know what's happening there. I think it didn't go that well, since he's still unattached. Women are strange. So is Hijino._

_I hope Ryuu uses his techniques wisely, if he's developing some. I am otherwise out of suggestions._

_Write soon. Don't get killed._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

The Chuunin Exam that Raiku would eventually pass was—

"We will never. Speak. Of this. Again. Get me?" Yamada gritted out, powering through Genematrix imperative through sheer force of will and placing an enormous red seal on that entire temporal arc.

'I think it went great!' Raiku said happily, hugging her new Chuunin vest to her chest. Bright green looked appalling on her, but who cared?! She had one and it was clean and new and she had earned it!

The rather more scorched majority of Team Yamada kept their eyes firmly ahead.

'Never again,' Ryuu agreed, the entire left side of his body blackened with soot.

'It was  _everywhere_ ,' Daisukenojo said in a hollow, dazed voice. He was still twitching involuntarily, every now and again.

Raiku grinned. 'It wasn't that bad! I'm a Chuunin now!' she exclaimed, waving her vest at them.

Ryuu glared at her with bloodshot eyes. 'You. Were.  _Lucky_.'

Raiku frowned and rolled her eyes. So maybe she hadn't been as careful as she should have been. They were all fine, and she was a Chuunin! With a deeply unflattering Chuunin vest!

She started smiling again at the thought, which only made Ryuu glare at her even more. Ryuu… didn't have one. Neither did Daisukenojo, she realized belatedly.

Oh dear god.

When it hit, it wasn't so much a wave of joy as it was a meteor, an enormous impact that obliterated her remaining, highly traumatised brain cells. 'I got to be a Chuunin before you!' she shrieked triumphantly, voice reaching a pitch previously thought impossible. She pointed at Ryuu, quickly thought better of it and pointed at Daisukenojo instead. 'I am a Chuunin and I am the first one! I am the  _greatest human being that has ever lived_!' she howled, completely out of her mind with exhaustion, relief and the knowledge that she was the greatest human being that had ever lived, probably.

Ryuu's trauma was shoved aside by his apoplectic rage. 'What?!'

Raiku laughed, loud and just on the edge of hysterical. 'I outrank you, Genin!'

Ryuu snarled and lunged for her, only for her to leap out of his reach and fall into a sprint immediately.

'You can't take this away from me! I am the greatest! I am better than you! I am unstoppable!'


	54. pacing problems

Raiku cleared her throat.

When this failed to help her find something to say, she did it again. 'So! I am a Chuunin,' she said.

Damn. Way to state the obvious,  _Raiku_.

'Yep.'

Kakashi wasn't exactly easy for her to talk to at the best of times, but this was ridiculous. Raiku was beginning to feel, in the part of her brain that dealt with the Genematrix full-time, as though many of her defining moments of the time-skip were beginning with her inability to speak to Hatake Kakashi. **  
**

Raiku narrowed her eyes and tightened her grip on her chopsticks. This couldn't go on. She was a Chuunin! She was very nearly sort of a young adult, she was doing okay at life, she hadn't made any enemies in months and she was _wearing a bra_ and by god, she was going to have a proper conversation with her teacher!

'Congratulate me!' she demanded, pointing her chopsticks at the Copy-nin from across the table. Kakashi looked up from his udon and blinked. 'You are my teacher and I just became a Chuunin, you have to congratulate me!'

Kakashi blinked again, slowly.

Raiku refused to budge. So, okay, it wasn't the most graceful opener anyone had used. It still covered the main point.

'Good job,' he said eventually. He creased his eye at her, but Raiku had been using that trick for most of her life and she refused to be taken in by it.

'That was insincere! I have  _achieved_  something!' She kind of wanted to shake him. 'I've never achieved anything before, and you and Yamada helped me do it!' Maybe she was letting a little too much of her insecurity into her voice, as Kakashi seemed to have frozen in place, like her vision was movement-based and he could use that to his advantage. 'You are going to congratulate me and I am going to thank you and we are both going to mean it or I am going to develop a complex, fail a mission and leave you to live with the knowledge that your lack of emotional availability caused my death!'  **  
**

Kakashi stared. Raiku took a second to catch her breath. That had maybe been a little over the top. The entire restaurant was staring at them now. Her dad was sort of inching away on the bench from both of them, undoubtedly regretting leaving Konoha to come and celebrate her promotion right away instead of waiting, while Yamada, unfazed, was taking advantage of the distraction to steal Kakashi's umeboshi.

Kakashi looked at her for a long moment while she tried to calm herself down, and the rest of the customers seemed to wait with bated breath. Her Chuunin vest was slightly too big and most definitely too green, but she was wearing it until she could get a different one and she was so obviously proud of herself and he was  _going to acknowledge her_.

He didn't shoot her that cheesy one-eyed grin, but his features seemed to relax slightly. 'Good job,' he said again, eventually, more quietly. Raiku met his gaze with a searching look of her own, trying to gauge his sincerity, before deciding she'd take it.

'Excellent!' She broke the moment of bonding, deeming it sufficient, and neatly pulled her chopsticks apart. Well, maybe in an ideal world, she actually ended up with half a chopstick in one hand and a splintery one and a half in the other, but she was used to that. She couldn't win them all. 'Let's eat!'

The waitress seemed to decide it was safe to come over and set down a plate of dumplings beside their each of their dishes. 'So cute,' she smiled, glancing between Raiku and Kakashi. 'It's so nice of your dad to take you out to celebrate like this; this is on the house, okay?'  **  
**

Her actual father's chopsticks snapped in half in his suddenly tight grip. Raiku, after a long pause, slowly pushed her half of the bench away from the table, which left Yamada at a strange, diagonal angle. The perfect angle to shake his head at Chitose as the other man gaped in dismay at the wooden splinters sticking out of his hands.

Kakashi beamed back at the woman, deftly sliding the dumpling plates towards himself. 'Thank you! It  _is_  nice of me, isn't it?'

The waitress smiled at him in a distinctly friendly manner as Raiku struggled to find a way to react. She had the familiar feeling of terrified energy coiled inside her, trying to find an outlet. Carefully and deliberately, in accordance with her deepest instincts, she placed her palms on the underside of the table's edge and braced herself. **  
**

Yamada saw what was about to happen too late. "Speedy, no!" he yelled, just in time for her to give a battle cry and flip the table.

 

 

 

 

 

_IWAO I PASSED I PASSED OKAY BUT NOW MY TEAM IS GOING TO KILL ME BUT I AM A CHUUNIN I AM THE BEST AND I AM ALIVE BUT ONLY FOR NOW PROBABLY WRITE SOON OH MY GOD_

_THIS IS FROM RAIKU BY THE WAY_

 

 

 

 

 

'So! Congratulations, everybody who made Chuunin!' Sakura exclaimed from the other end of the very long table, populated almost entirely by their peers. 'Good job!'

There was a chorus of vague agreement before everybody was finally allowed to eat, digging into the assorted dishes with enthusiasm.

Well, almost everybody.

Raiku glared at Ryuu, who was gloating from his place across from her. 'You going to take your mask off, toaster?' he asked slyly.

Raiku made a low growling sound and shook her head, never breaking eye contact. She hadn't wanted to come to this rather impromptu celebration and her teammates had forced her to anyway as soon as she got back, before she could recover enough to realize their true agenda. Their agenda being to put her in a position where she would be uncomfortable and unable to eat anything without showing everyone her face.

They were getting worryingly good at vengeance. She was going to have to keep an eye on that.

Ryuu's smirk only became more pronounced. 'Hm. That will make it hard to eat anything, won't it?'

From his place on her left, Lee took in this exchange with open fascination. So, to Daisukenojo's dismay, did Tenten, seated on the other side of Lee, who was listening to this... this  _entrapment,_ instead of continuing to talk to the redhead. **  
**

'So you won't be wanting those, then?' Ryuu asked, reaching across with his chopsticks to steal her dumplings. He narrowly dodged a chopstick in the back of the hand when Raiku slammed one of hers downwards so hard that it stood sticking out of the table when she released it.

'Oops,' she ground out, skin starting to crackle quietly, ' _it slipped_.'

'Well!' Lee interrupted quickly, trying to keep the peace. 'I think it's a big step! Congratulations, Raiku!'

Raiku finally stopped glaring at Ryuu, just long enough for her eyes to slide over to look at Lee. '...Thank you,' she said, relaxing a little. 'Congratulations to you too, Lee.'

He beamed at her. Literally, his teeth sparkled enough to almost be a light source on their own. Not that Raiku was in a position to criticise that. 'Thank you! I knew you could do it, as you are—'

'Don't. Please don't,' Daisukenojo grumbled, rubbing his face. 'He'll just want to kill her more.'

Lee tilted his head, looking a lot like a confused owl. 'What? Of course not! Ryuu is just trying to provoke Raiku to greater heights of achievement, as any good teammate would! Ryuu!'

Ryuu's eyes widened at Lee's emphatic address.

'Your selfless dedication to the improvement of your—'

He was interrupted yet again, this time by Neji. 'Lee. Your food is getting cold.'

Lee blinked and then took the hint because, despite strangely popular belief, he was no idiot. 'Oh! Thank you!'

Raiku, meanwhile, hastily pulled her mask back up just in time to avoid being seen, having taken advantage of the distraction to cram several dumplings into her mouth at once.

Neji shot her a deeply unimpressed look, conveying his obvious displeasure with her table manners. He knew what she'd done. She looked a bit like a chipmunk, though, so that wasn't hard. Still, it wasn't like she'd had a choice, so she just averted her gaze and proceeded to pretend he wasn't there. That wasn't that difficult either, since he was diagonally across from her at an awkward angle, so... that was , now that Ryuu's taunting had momentarily abated, Daisukenojo was able to drag Tenten back into conversation on his other side.

'It was nice of Sakura to put this together,' Raiku said, poking her food moodily. 'Since she's already made Chuunin earlier than us.'

Lee hummed in agreement. 'Sakura is an example to every one of us!'

Raiku nodded, but couldn't bring herself to look over at her. Something about the pink-haired girl stung her slightly, even though she knew she should be happy for her. 'She's really something,' she threw in. 'But it's sort of strange to see how everybody's growing up.' It fell short, because she didn't think she was and she cursed how obviously it must have been written on her face.

She and Lee fell into a lull that she thought was entirely too strained.  **  
**

'I guess so,' he said with his characteristic cheer. When she risked a glance at him, he was looking at her with his wide, guileless eyes, and it had been a long time since she'd let herself fall into the trap of thinking Rock Lee was stupid. 'You've grown up a lot too, Raiku.'

Raiku stared at him for a moment, then looked back at her food, hating that she felt even slightly reassured by such a minor platitude, hating that she sort of needed it, because she was a Gairano and Gairano didn't Angst like this. '... Thanks,' she said anyway, because she may have hated it, but she just felt grateful nevertheless. She felt compelled to return the kindness, somehow, because she didn't spend a lot of time with Lee but he was  _always_  nice to her anyway. 'You know... you're a really good guy, Lee.'

He smiled, and she could almost feel Ryuu, or maybe Neji, glaring at her.

Raiku smiled back at Lee anyway, because she couldn't please everyone.  **  
**

 

 

 

 

_Raiku,_

_Congratulations on becoming a Chuunin. It's an important milestone and not an easy task. You should be proud of yourself. Where did it end up being held? Did your teammates pass? What was it like? I hope you're not injured._

_Oh, Hijino is going to help me. He thinks it's a good way to teach the twins a lesson in team spirit. He uses "team spirit" as a threat, though. I'm a little worried. But I don't want to steal your thunder. Take some time. Be happy that you passed. I am happy for you._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

The Chuunin Exam that Raiku eventually passed, the Genematrix tried again with admirable tenacity, was—

'Not important!' Raiku interrupted. The three of them had been waiting for Yamada, but she clearly had to provide some extra motivation, because that just was not going to cut it. 'Now! I am a Chuunin and neither of you are because you are the worst and I am the best,' she continued, hands on her hips as Ryuu struggled against Daisukenojo's immediate headlock behind her. She tried very hard not to cringe away, because this was important! Naruto, as far as Raiku could make out, was supposed to be the last one to make the slow winding down of the hyper-charged flow of time that she was beginning to feel, that meant that her team and the other remaining Genin were running out of time to pass.

She'd taken it upon herself to give them some extra motivation, because they had to pass the next Exams, and they didn't have very long. This was going to  _suck_. But still, if she didn't, and they didn't pass... **  
**

She shook her head. No need to give the Genematrix any ideas.

'Just let me kill her,' she heard Ryuu hiss. Maybe. It was almost like a homicidal croon, which couldn't have been reassuring for Daisukenojo. 'I'll make it quick.'

'All of which means!' She spun around and pointed at them. 'I get to tell you what to do!'

The air rose sharply in temperature, enough for her to start sweating slightly. Or maybe that was the murderous glint in Ryuu's startling yellow eyes. Had they always been such a vivid shade of yellow? Surely they had been closer to brown when their team got together?

She shook herself out of it. Not important! She had a mission to accomplish!

She looked Ryuu right in his homicidal eyes.

And laughed.

Both Ryuu and Daisukenojo froze, and there was a moment of perfect stillness.

'Toaster,' Daisukenojo said, 'you were a pretty good teammate.'

'Thank you, Daisuke. So were you,' Raiku said bravely, standing up straight and ready to meet her doom.

From where he was walking up the nearby road, Yamada felt more than heard the explosion that shook the training grounds.

"Goddamnit," he grumbled, picking up the pace. "Can't leave those little bastards alone for five minutes."

 

 

 

 

 

_Youngest Kazekage in Sand Village History!_

_Earlier today, Sand Village named its fifth Kazekage, after an unusually long period without an appointed leader. Gaara (or Gaara of the Sand as he is also known), the youngest of the fourth Kazekage's three children, is now the youngest Kazekage ever to [continued]_

Raiku very carefully set down the article clipping she had been sent without bothering to read the rest, and took a few slow, deep breaths, staring into space. After a few minutes she reached into her desk drawer and rummaged through the letters there until she found a mostly blank piece of paper, with only two words and her address on it. She held it up to compare the handwriting to the writing of address on the envelope that had contained the article.

After another long moment, she put both of them down, and noticed that on the back of the article was written:

_congratulations. you are a chuunin now._

Raiku covered her mouth with her hands, and muffled her terrified scream of realization into her fingers.

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku adjusted her mask, her face set in a mask of grim determination. She could do this. She was a Chuunin and that meant she had to be strong. She could do it.

'You ready?' Daisukenojo asked from beside her.

Raiku nodded. 'Yep.'

She tensed, readying herself to move.

The wind ruffled her hair. **  
**

In retrospect, that should have been a warning sign.

Daisukenojo charged forward with a cry as Raiku stepped off a nearby lamppost and jumped, lighting up and flashing through the air, the two of them hurtling forward as a team.

Mere meters from their target, they both collided violently with an invisible barrier that viciously hurled them backwards on impact, the two sent flying backwards through the air to land and skid along the concrete.

A pause.

'What was  _that_?!'

'We didn't even get to the door!' Daisukenojo groaned, barely audible over Raiku's pained noises.

The front door clicked open.

'Mum! I'm going out!' Ryuu's call could distantly be heard over their pained groans, his mother's cheerful answer too muffled for them to make out the words. Raiku curled into a ball on her side, the pain of impact making everything hurt, Daisukenojo sprawled out and twitching next to her. She heard footsteps, which had to have been deliberate because Ryuu was a sneaky bastard normally, and then he appeared, looking down at her.

Ryuu smirked. 'You're going to have to do a lot better than that,  _Chuunin_ ,' he said, and stepped over her to walk down the street.

Raiku glared after him, the throbbing dying down in favor of the sting of scraped skin.

Oh,  _she would_.

 

 

 

 

 

_Iwao,_

_Thank you! It's so exciting! I haven't gotten any Chuunin missions yet, I think because my team hasn't passed and so on, but it's so cool! I am officially a person! Not to Yamada, who says that's reserved for Jounin and people too smart to try and be shinobi at all, but still! It was held in Tani, like you said, and it wasn't so bad? I think all the training with my ability really helped, so I owe Kakashi a lot. Even if he's totally evil. How are you doing?! You didn't say!_

_I'm glad Hijino is going to help you! My teacher uses that as a threat too, so I know how it feels. Please be careful. I'm sure it's nothing, but they might be angry._

_Thank you._

_Raiku_

_P.S: THUNDER I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE_ _**  
** _

 

 

 

 

 

Her father smiled. 'Hey!'

Nothing good ever started that way. Her father usually grumbled his way through the morning. Raiku was developing a real fear of entering her kitchen as a direct consequence of his inconsiderate social life. The time-skip was making her so paranoid about it that she'd started using a mirror to check it for safety, but she for some reason had forgotten it that morning.

…Which should have been her first warning sign,  _damnit_ , she cursed internally. 'Hey, dad,' she replied, recognizing when she'd lost.

He gestured to the two people sitting across from him. 'You remember Aburame Muta and Atsuko?'  **  
**

Raiku visibly relaxed. 'Oh, hey!' she greeted with much more enthusiasm. 'How are you?'

And really, how could she not have recognized them? Aburame Muta wore goggles and a high collar, and that would have been a dead giveaway even if he hadn't married her cousin. He nodded at her, and he had very plain hair, she noted with approval. Dark brown and straight and parted only slightly right of center. Very nice, very unremarkable.

Judging from her warm expression, Raiku's cousin Atsuko agreed. Atsuko was similarly unimpressive. Her hair even resembled her husband's. Raiku eyed the plain brown locks with envy.

Her father chuckled. 'Grab some breakfast. These guys just stopped by to say hello.'

Raiku nodded and moved past into the kitchen, grabbing their insulated oven mitts so that she could try and make some toast. She was never going to live that first mistake down; she couldn't afford to make another one. She listened to their conversation with half an ear, mostly preoccupied with her plans for the day. Run from Kakashi, scream a little, end up with her face smooshed into the ground; standard stuff, really.  **  
**

'—and so here is the picture,' she caught the tail-end of, which piqued her interest. She peered over the kitchen island but she was at the wrong angle to see whatever Atsuko had handed her father. 'I think this could really work out.'

Ah. Raiku nodded and turned her attention back to her breakfast, gingerly trying to hold a wooden chopstick in each mitted hand to get the bread into the toaster. So that was what this was about. Gairano generally married civilians, or extremely (and carefully) distant relatives, but they would occasionally marry people from non-Plot Magnet clans just to keep the peace. Clans like the Aburame.

It made a lot of sense; the Aburame were large and kept to themselves, much like the Gairano. Unlike the Gairano, they usually also produced powerful shinobi with unsettling regularity, but their bloodline ability was so weird and considered by so many to be unattractive that they didn't really get much Genematrix attention. Relations between her family and the Aburame Clan had historically always been very good.

Unlike that one awkward time with that one Uchiha. Raiku shuddered at the memory of that old tale, secondhand embarrassment making her skin crawl. Fortunately this went unnoticed, and the meeting seemed to be wrapping up.

'It was good to see you again,' Atsuko told her on the way out, Raiku's father and Muta saying exactly nothing to each other and just nodding in manly acknowledgement. Raiku smiled and waved, and since Atsuko was a generous soul, she didn't even comment on the mitts as she left.

And that was when the morning went to hell.

'Raiku,' her dad began, once they were alone in their kitchen. 'Sit down.'

Raiku hesitantly crossed the room to pull out the chair opposite him, munching on her toast loudly just to make some white noise.

Her father took a deep breath. 'I asked Atsuko to look into some… people you might be interested in.'

Raiku inhaled so sharply she could feel toast crumbs entering her sinuses. While she went cross-eyed with agony and silently clawed at her face, her father continued. 'I know! You're getting to that age. Well, you've been at it for a while. Technically. And I want to support your personal growth!' he said encouragingly, pushing the envelope towards her. 'She came back with someone I think you should talk to. Not to marry, obviously, arranged marriages are rife with Drama, but I think you should meet! You have a lot in common.' **  
**

Raiku's horrified writhing finally abating, she stared at the envelope, before drawing it towards herself.

After another long, drawn out pause, she opened it and pulled out a picture.

For a while she just stared at it.

Then she realized the Aburame, eyes hidden and collar high enough to obscure the characteristically largely androgynous face, was a girl. Maybe? She'd made that mistake before, so she wasn't game to ask.

'Her name is Hisoka!' her father said brightly, and yes, that was a girl. 'She's quiet and practical and she likes butterflies. You like those! You're off to a great start already.' **  
**

Raiku was… not sure how to respond to this. When she had started as a Genin, Raiku had dreaded heading towards female homosexuality for the simple reason that the Genematrix seemed fascinated by it and she was conspicuous enough already. However, she had later learned the Genematrix usually got distracted or confused halfway through any attempt to portray it in either gender, and so a while ago it seemed to have resolved not to touch it at all. So the Gairano, naturally, had become extremely open-minded about everything to do with it. Even Raiku had to admit that it would be an appealing prospect if she turned out to like girls. It made sense that her father would be open to it for her too—

Wait.

Actually, if the Genematrix ignored any lead-ins to homosexuality in Plots or Side-Plots, that explained this whole thing.

'Dad,' Raiku said flatly, 'I'm not going to be a lesbian just because you really want me to be one.'

'But she's so cute!' he protested, taking waving the picture of Hisoka in which she was, Raiku had to admit, rather adorably inconspicuous. 'She'd be perfect for you! Her name means "reserved", even; she is your ideal thematic counterbalance!' **  
**

Raiku sighed, realized how melodramatic it had sounded, and then tried it again in a less theatrical way. There. Perfect. 'I don't care how little Plot attention gay people usually get—'

'None,' her father interjected. 'They get  _non_ e.'

'—I'm not an anything yet! I've never liked someone! I don't even know what kind of someone I like yet! You're all about waiting and seeing usually anyway, you know you can't try and steer me into anything!'

Her father had to concede that point; sexually repressing (or in this case, openly encouraging) your children was a bad move in terms of Childhood Trauma ratings, which weren't set in stone until the end of the time-skip. She had him there; he would have to wait and see what happened, or he risked messing things up. He seemed to reach the same conclusion and nodded, setting the picture down on the table and steepling his fingers in front of his face.

'Okay?' she asked, just to make sure.

'…You're not interested in girls just to punish me,' he said sadly. 'This is teen rebellion, isn't it? It's finally happening.'

Raiku snatched the picture and flipped it over to lie face-down. 'Oh no! This conversation is over until I actually like someone!' She realized that that opened her up for future trouble and hastened to correct. 'Actually, no, it's over forever!'

'I just want you to be happy and to enjoy your teenage years! …With a lovely young lady! Raiku? Where are you going? Hey, come back here! Raiku!'

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Gaara,_

_Hello! This is Raiku. Again. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you for your letter newspaper clipping message. Congratulations on becoming the Kazekage! Is that what I'm supposed to say, I have no idea, this isn't exactly a normal level of achievement._

_Good job!_

_I'm going to go ahead and stop here before I say anything stupid I mean write anything stupid oh god it's already started THANK YOU FOR CONGRATULATING ME CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU TOO_

 

 

 

 

 

Brute force wasn't her way in.

Raiku crouched on a roof two houses away from Ryuu's place, hidden by the chimney stack, and thought about it.

She could just not do it at all, some part of her brain suggested, but she disregarded that right away, of course. She wasn't going to give up just because Ryuu wanted her to. If she did everything Ryuu wanted, he'd be intolerable and she'd be dead, probably.

So! Brute force wasn't her way in. If Ryuu could sense her approach in the air, she would just have to strike while he wasn't home.

All she had to do was wait.

Fortunately she knew exactly when Ryuu was going to go out and meet Yamada for some training, so she barely had to wait for twenty minutes before she spotted him leaving via the window, because why use the door when there was a perfectly good window?

She rolled her eyes. Shinobi.

She also squawked and ducked down out of sight when Ryuu paused, standing on his neighbour's roof, oddly tense. She waited for a few terrifying seconds for him to appear and murder her horribly, but after a few minutes had passed peacefully, risked another look.

He was gone.

Oh god, it was a trap!

No, she told herself sternly. It was a normal Wednesday and she was going to  _go to Ryuu's house._

She slunk around the chimney stack and jumped down onto the road, not so much walking as scurrying over to Ryuu's front gate.

She took a deep breath to ready herself.

After she was sufficiently calm and emotionally ready to be eviscerated, Raiku took one careful step over the property line, her eyes squeezed closed as she braced herself for another painful trip to the ground.

When nothing happened, she opened her eyes and carefully, she took another.

By the third step, she was feeling a little better.

A few more and she was at the door, hovering.

She knew Ryuu. She didn't like it, but it was an indisputable fact. She knew him quite well and the Ryuu she knew was paranoid and sadistic. He loved mind-games. It would be completely in-character for him to let her get almost to her goal before he—

No! She shook her head. No, Ryuu was smart but he was  _not_  omniscient and it was ridiculous to think he could predict her every move.

She raised her hand to knock, but hesitated.

She gnawed on her lip.

Ridiculous.

Wasn't it?

No, no, it was and she was going to do this.

Raiku took a deep breath and knocked.

The world spun and she staggered a few steps before falling over, skinning her knee hard against a nearby log.

She looked around, because  _seriously_?! Of all the moments the time-skip could have picked, it chose  _then_  to just deposit her somewhere in the woods— **  
**

"Speedy?"

She whirled around and Yamada frowned down at her, looming out of the shadows cast by the forest. "What are you doing out here?"

Raiku blinked, opened her mouth, then closed it again.

'Yes,  _Raiku_.'

She shuddered at the sound of Ryuu speaking somewhere behind her.

'What  _are_  you doing out here?'

Raiku closed her eyes.

Okay. Not the time-skip.

So maybe Ryuu  _was_  omniscient.

 _She had known all along_.

"Well! You're here now, so you can join in, get me?!" Yamada gestured between them. "It'll be good practice. Speedy, you run, and Sullen, you try and stop her. Ready?"

' _Absolutely.'_

'I object!' Raiku squeaked, waving her hands to try and fend off Yamada's suggestion, somehow. 'I'm not ready!'

"And go!"

Raiku wailed and ducked away from Ryuu's outstretched hand, putting on an extra burst of speed to try and get away.

So it appeared that neither brute force or Ryuu's absence was going to work in this case.

If she survived this, she would have to think of something else.

 

 

 

 

 

_Raiku,_

_You are a person. I am fine. I've been training very hard recently, mostly because Hijino wants to submit us for consideration as Jounin next year, or maybe the year after. He says we're young, but he wants us to do well. He's supposed to be a genius. He seems to know what he's doing. I'm going along with it for now._

_I'm surprised that only you passed. Not because I don't think you're strong enough, but because your teammates sounded like they were doing well. I've heard weird rumours about those Exams. Did anything strange happen?_

_The plan to look into what the twins is doing is on hold until they're back training with us full-time. They've both been around a lot more anyway. Maybe they were just fighting in secret again. It wouldn't be the first time._

_I might get a mission to Konoha soon._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

'Focus.'

'I am focusing! Why don't  _you_  focus?!' Raiku asked shrilly.

She met Kakashi's dark, steady gaze and squirmed uncomfortably with the knowledge that she just couldn't win. Grudgingly, she rolled her shoulders to try and get rid of the tension and settled into a relaxed, cross-legged pose.

As relaxed as she could be while sitting on a tiny post sticking just about a meter out of a fast-moving river.

'Can I at least ask why it has to be here?!' she asked, trying to slow her shallow breathing. She couldn't concentrate, she couldn't  _think_  with all that water everywhere and oh god, what if she  _fell—_

Kakashi smiled at her from where he stood on the water next to her. 'You have to be able to concentrate even when you're in danger.'

'Maybe we should work our way up to this?' she suggested, lacing her fingers together to hide how they were shaking. She could feel her eye twitching every time a fleck of water made its way onto her clothes.

'Focus.'

Raiku was one square inch away from begging. 'I don't want to—'

'Focus,' he instructed patiently, or as close as Kakashi ever got to patiently. She'd thought it was that, at first, but really everybody was just fooled by his even tone. It wasn't so much patience as the utter certainty that, eventually, the other person was going to do what he said. A tone of inevitability, as much as such a thing could exist.

Raiku fixed her gaze on something in the distance and tried to calm herself down. She could feel her heart racing in her chest, the nervous, twitchy energy of adrenaline racing through her. Plus the water, couldn't forget  _all that water—_

'Focus.'

God  _damn_ him. Raiku inhaled and exhaled slowly, tightening the grip of her trembling fingers and focusing on that tense ache until she felt a little more centered.

'Good. Now the next part.'

Oh goodie, the next part. Raiku fought the urge to close her eyes and turned her attention inwards, to the anxiously ebbing and flowing power trying to get out through her skin. It was so easy to sink into that she felt herself relaxing almost unwillingly, the  _whitehothungry_  power dragging itself to the forefront. But this was the next part, and Kakashi was right; glowing was a dead giveaway on a mission.

This was important, she told herself, even as she cringed at the thought.

This was important, she thought again, and tried to drag that power downwards into herself.

It hurt. She was trying to drag it back in on itself and it  _hurt_ , power slipping through her control and desperately trying to keep flowing freely, expanding into every free space that she turned her attention away from. Slowly but steadily, she persisted, and felt the curious sensation of coldness in her extremities as the energy was pulled, kicking and screaming, away. It felt... dark, and cold, and she could hear her heart beating loudly all of a sudden, sounding sluggish and strange. She heard a muffled, low sound one, then again as she kept trying, that centre of electricity growing smaller and more potent by the second, growing smaller and smaller.

A moment of weightlessness, and Raiku hit the water.

The cold water swallowed her whole and she came back to herself with a violent spasm, eyes widening, stinging, and she inhaled reflexively. The water flooded down her airway to sit heavy in her lungs and she choked on it, hands coming up to grasp at her throat and electricity was pouring out of her into the water, pouring out of her white-glowing skin even as the current dragged her downstream. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't  _breathe_ , she had no air left and she tried to grab at the river bottom to slow herself down and only succeeded in her fingers stirring up silt, muddying the already murky waters.

Her chest was burning and she couldn't pull a thought together through the suffocation and the power ripping gleefully out of her, too caught up in the conductivity and dissipating away from her and—

The floor of the river jerked and then something hit her hard in the chest, the force propelling her upwards and throwing her out of the water, hurled through the air until she hit the ground with an impact that made her teeth rattle, rolling a few times before coming to a stop on the mud. She turned herself over and coughed violently, sopping hair sparking and crackling where it hung around her face, surrounded by a rapidly growing pool of water that fizzled ominously. She choked and gasped, inhaling greedily and digging her fingers into the ground just so she could feel like she was holding onto it. Her chest was hurting viciously, the familiar pain of broken ribs and the heat of an already blossoming bruise marking where the spire of earth had shoved her out of the water.

'Gairano. Gairano, you're alright,' she heard Kakashi say from somewhere nearby, and it was only then that she realized she was half-gasping, half-sobbing on each inhale. She felt him pat her back, felt the power of a careful layer of chakra between his hand and her wet clothes. 'You're alright.'

'I'm not doing that again,' she rasped, yanking down her mask so that the wet, clinging fabric couldn't obstruct her ragged breathing. 'I'm not.' She wiped at her face and knew she'd only made herself dirtier, but she felt the sting of hysterical tears and she'd rather be muddy than crying.

There was a brief pause, and then Kakashi patted her on the back again. 'We'll think of something else.'

She nodded, shoulder shaking with another repressed sob. When she finally could bring herself to look up at him, he was studying her, a strange look in his eyes.

She tried a watery, very nearly weepy smile, and after a moment of further scrutiny he glanced back towards the river. She followed his gaze, one hand rubbing her chest, and took in the dead fish floating towards the surface, the blackened, dead plants, the haze hanging over the water.

 

 

 

 

 

_Iwao,_

_Jounin already?! You can't be serious? No way! You guys are so young! You can't! Not that you_  can't _can't, but I mean, that seems really extreme! Still, I guess you know how strong you are, so you'd know._

_Why, what have you heard? Nothing strange happened at the Exams, nothing strange at all it was all totally normal and nothing weird happened or ever happened there that's totally ridiculous_

_Anyway, your team is super creepy! Well, you aren't, but the whole situation is really weird. Please don't be offended. I'm sorry. You aren't creepy. You're my friend. My team is doing pretty well, still, but they've taken to ambushing me. They say it's because they want to keep me on my toes, but it's because they're jealous and I keep provoking them. I am a Chuunin, though, and I will win! Unless they try to break into my house again. Then my dad will win._

_I hope you come and see me! Unless that would be weird and crossing some weird sort of penpal line that I don't know about. Then I hope you don't. If it isn't then I hope you do! I'll stop now._

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

When she remembered, she ended up almost spraying her father with her mouthful of tea. 'Should I still be checking on Mura?!'

Her father frowned at her over his slightly damp book, obviously unimpressed with her lack of composure. And her memory. And her table manners. But what else was new?

' _Really_?'

She went red. 'I remembered eventually! Should I?!'

He sighed. 'No, Raiku. You shouldn't.'

Raiku's sudden tension refused to believe it was that easy. How could she have forgotten? How could she have forgotten for almost  _three years_?! Was it the time-skip, was it just shuffling things around in her brain until it needed them to come up again? The thought made her feel vaguely unclean, but she had to push through!

'I thought she was my responsibility until she stopped displaying Dramatic behaviour?!'

He turned his attention back to the book, turning a page. 'No longer inside our jurisdiction.'

That didn't seem right. Gairano didn't leave Gairano jurisdiction. Gairano didn't go places. Unless they were shinobi, but Mura wasn't one. Had she married out? No, even that didn't mean Raiku could stop keeping an eye on her.

Oh, wait.

'Was she reassigned during my Plot?' Raiku asked, relaxing slightly. That was the most obvious explanation.

Her father shook his head.

Raiku frowned. 'So, wait. Where is she?'

'Oh, she's dead,' her father replied absently, flicking through to get back to his page.

Raiku dropped her mug. It hadn't been more than a centimeter off the table, so it mostly just wobbled precariously before settling, but given the gravity of the situation it should probably have shattered. 'Dead?' she repeated.

He hummed again. 'Dead.'

Impossible. Mura couldn't have just died without Raiku knowing about it. The woman had been such a deliberate Drama magnet that Raiku had gotten a Plot attached to her without even knowing about it while she was responsible for her! And wait, how old had she been? What could she possibly have died of?

'How?' she eventually managed through the haze of shock.

Her father made a noncommittal sound and kept his eyes on his book, his expression as neutral as it usually was. As though they were discussing something harmless, just some piece of family trivia. Nanao's had a baby, Aki's starting school, oh, and Mura's dead.

'Does this not seem abrupt to you?!' Raiku demanded. Her family was no stranger to death. Gairano died in groups, the faceless casualties of a thousand things. But Mura had been trying to distance herself, and while she had done so by effectively stripping someone of what little free will they had just so that they would love her, it made no sense for her to just… stop living.

Her father turned another page. 'No. It doesn't,' he replied after a long moment. And Raiku didn't know what it was, because his tone was mild and he was looking particularly harmless that day, but…

'Dad,' she said slowly, gripping her mug just to have something to hold on to. 'Dad,' she began when words failed her, only for it to happen again. 'Mura, she was…' young and selfish and happy to drag Raiku down into her personal Drama arc just so that she could have one, and oh god; her father hadn't liked that at all. But he was the Head of the family. It was his job to look after all of them as best he could, and not just Raiku. Even though, looking back, all of Raiku's problems had really started with Mura, who made Raiku question herself, who made Raiku question everything and Brood and worst yet, Angst. Mura, who was so willing to use some Genin as her sacrificial lamb, but her father wouldn't have just…

Her father glanced up and he looked right through her. 'Yes?' he asked, and he looked so guileless.

'…When did it happen?' Raiku asked instead of what she had meant to, what she wanted to. Instead of asking him why he'd snapped and let Mura die, which part of Mura's selfishness had pushed him over the edge and if it bothered him at all to remember that he had killed, or allowed to be killed, one member of his family for jeopardizing another.

He tilted his head as he thought about it for a moment, and it was all so perfectly harmless, it was all so casual that she knew, she suddenly knew exactly when and exactly how Mura had died. '…About two, three years ago?' he eventually offered. He waved a hand, dismissing the topic. 'Early into the time-skip.' With a shrug, he went back to reading.

Raiku fell silent, unsure of what to say. She knew her dad loved her, and she knew equally well that he took his duty to their family extremely seriously. She wasn't sure how to deal with the idea that she could drive him, her logical, utilitarian family Head, to lose his temper so spectacularly.

She picked her mug up again and just turned it in her hands, staring into it as she tried to make this fit into her worldview. The mug, unsurprisingly, offered her no help.

Dead.

Just like that.

 

 

 

 

 

_[Wastebasket, mostly burnt piece of paper]_

_-u didn't come to see us whi-_

_-ike to - you, Ryu-_

_\- next time you'-_

_can find us wher- over th-_

_-rom, your famil-_

 

 

 

 

 

Ryuu's house was seemingly impregnable. Raiku could accept that. Once she'd talked herself through possible entry scenarios a few thousand times, she could accept that. Bitterly. Grudgingly.

But, she thought as she peered over a shopping aisle to see Ryuu's mother perusing the vegetable section, Raiku rationalized that Ryuu couldn't stop her from meeting his mother in a public place. Just  _happening_  to bump into her surely wouldn't warrant a death sentence. He couldn't be everywhere at once.

Well, he almost definitely could. But it would be worth it.

Raiku ignored the weird glances she was getting for clambering over the shelves and dropped down, giving a nearby eldery woman a business-like nod. Nothing to see here. Just a totally normal day with a totally normal person climbing up shelves of produce to spy on their friend's mother. Totally. Normal.

She coughed and briskly walked around the corner of the aisle, swerving back to grab a shopping basket on the way so that she would seem to have a legitimate reason to be there.

Totally normal.

She glanced around and saw Ryuu's mother heading for the frozen section and cut around the other side so that she could just  _happen_  to spot her from the other end. The closer she got to her target, the more paranoid she got. There were too many variables. Ryuu could be anywhere.

Or everywhere.

Raiku paled as she remembered his weird dissolving trick and walked slightly faster. She was definitely going to die. She could accept that. But she would be damned if she'd be beaten by Ryuu in addition to being murdered by him  _it didn't have to make sense._

Ryuu's mother spotted her, probably because she was almost running, when Raiku made it to the frozen section. She smiled in recognition and waved. Raiku stopped in her tracks and waved back, slightly less enthusiastically.

'Go ahead.'

Raiku jumped and almost knocked over a small display of canned goods, their collapse halted only by a familiar, tanned hand. Ryuu -and where had he even  _come from_  other than  _hell itself—_ carefully pushed the jostled cans back into place, keeping his eyes on them instead of her. 'Go ahead and say hello,' he invited, voice both mild and oddly pleasant. 'She's right there.'

Raiku stared at him with wide eyes, pressed back against the cool glass of one of the fridges.

'She's very friendly. Very maternal,' he assured her, making sure the labels were all facing the same way they had been before she'd accidentally attacked them. 'She's looking forward to meeting you.'

'...I'm going to,' Raiku said, pushing herself off the fridge and squaring her shoulders. 'See if I don't!'

'You should.' Ryuu finally looked at her, sticking his hands into his pockets. His expression was mild and oddly expectant. Smug, maybe. It said one thing: I know something you don't.

It was possibly, out of all of his various looks, the expression Raiku was most threatened by.

'I should,' Raiku agreed slowly, eyes flicking back towards Ryuu's mother, who was looking rather fondly at what she must have thought was a friendly exchange. She still looked normal. It had to be a trap.

Ryuu smiled, close-lipped.

Raiku was beginning to feel trapped by Ryuu's knowing attitude. Which was  _exactly what he wanted_.

She rallied. 'You haven't had time to set a trap for me! You just want to get inside my head,' she accused, watching him carefully because she absolutely was not convinced by what she was saying and he was capable of  _anything_

Ryuu's face gave nothing away. His stupid, beautiful face. 'I haven't,' he agreed, but something in his intonation implied a second sentence.

'...But?' she prompted, when none was forthcoming.

'But what?' he asked innocently.

Raiku met his gaze and hovered, caught in her agonized indecision. The tension mounted and she started to sweat slightly, despite the cold air.

'Well?' he invited, gesturing towards the other end where his mother was starting to come towards them.

Raiku broke and hurled the basket at Ryuu's completely unsurprised face, sprinting for the exit.

'Raiku?' she heard a female call uncertainly behind her, but she couldn't risk it.

Ryuu had won the battle,  _yet again._

But she would be damned if she lost the war!

 

 

 

 

 

_Raiku,_

_It's not unusual for someone my age or slightly older to be a Jounin. It's just a goal right now, anyway. As it is, the Chuunin missions are becoming slightly repetitive. Maybe that is lucky. I should be grateful. Predictable means non-fatal. I don't want to die. But I don't want to feel like what I'm doing doesn't make a difference. It's a balance. I hope to be useful. It's why I became a shinobi._

_I haven't heard anything about your Exam. That's why it's unusual. But you don't want to talk about it. I won't pry. Sorry._

_I know you don't think I'm creepy. But you haven't seen me in a long time now. Maybe I am creepy. People tend to ignore me and talk to the twins. The twins smile more. I don't tend to. I only smile when I'm happy, and I don't like talking as much as they do. Maybe I should try harder. I'm sorry, I don't mean to talk about myself so much._

_I will let you know if I am heading to Konoha. It looks like I will soon. I would like to see you if I do._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

She should have known.

No good thing ever, in the history of anything, had started with the words "I want to try something."

Logically, those words coming from Ryuu should have set off an avalanche just from sheer, inevitable doom.

Raiku stood across from him in a ready stance, sweating slightly from fear. Ryuu was concentrating. That never meant anything good. She had to force herself not to jump back when he raised his hands, chakra spiking.

"Easy, Speedy," Yamada cautioned, and she relaxed as much as she could.

Ryuu's hands flicked rapidly through symbols that Raiku didn't recognize (not that that was hard), and suddenly the air around them seemed to shift. Just slightly, but in the back of her mind it felt like a sudden path splitting through the air for her to move through, and she stopped blinking, stopped breathing. She swayed forward, almost dragged forward by the lure of that path, of such little resistance and she could feel the moisture in the air, could feel tiny sparks coming off her in anticipation of power as she leaned towards the one person she would ordinarily rather never be near, and—

And that was when Daisukenojo punched her in the ear.

The explosion of pain broke the lure of least resistance immediately. 'MY EAR!'

'My arm!' Daisukenojo cried in only a slightly lower pitch, the muscles of the offending limb twitching and going into spasm from even that brief contact. Ryuu stepped back and away from Raiku, undoubtedly reminded of what would have happened if she'd connected.

Raiku screwed her eyes shut and tried to block out the ringing in the side of her head, dark spots blooming behind her eyes after the white-hot surge of pain. 'Why did you punch me in the ear?!' she demanded, words slurring together slightly from pain and surprise. 'Why would you  _ever_  do that, who _does_  that?!'

'You were acting weird!'

'It was his technique, you—you  _asshole_!' Raiku clapped both hands over her mouth as soon as it came out, eyes wide with horror at her own daring use of a very mild swearword.

Daisukenojo gasped.

Yamada, standing a few feet away, rubbed his temples, because how did training always go so wrong?

'Y-you heard me!' Raiku refused to back down. She'd been punched in the ear. Only assholes did that—wow, that had actually been easier. And sort of liberating! He was an asshole, he was an asshole—

Raiku realized she was starting to snigger to herself and quickly tried to tone it down a little.

Daisukenojo looked scandalized. 'You can't call me that!'

'Why not?' Ryuu asked, chewing on a piece of grass seemingly only for nostalgia's sake, evidently displeased at the interruption of his technique experiment. 'You are one, fuckwit.'

"Hey!" Yamada barked. "That one's out of line! Drop!"

Ryuu rolled his eyes theatrically and dropped from standing onto his fingers and toes, because he knew the drill by then.

Daisukenojo had ignored him, unsurprisingly. 'You don't swear!'

'Well apparently I do!' Raiku retorted, standing up a little straighter. 'And it was kind of fun!'

Daisukenojo gasped again. This unexpected character development seemed to have wounded him down to his moral core. 'You did this!' he accused Ryuu, pointing a still-twitching finger. 'You … you corrupted her!'

'Right,' Ryuu muttered between push-ups. 'Because she listens to everything I say.'

'I do!' Raiku agreed. 'I listen because you threaten me about ninety percent of the time and I need to know how you will eventually kill me!'

'Oh, like  _that_  would help you see me coming—'

"Everybody  _shut up_!" Yamada roared, and it was only years of intimidation and outright terror that broke the chain of rapid escalation.

They looked at him.

Yamada looked like he'd tasted something bad.

"As I was  _gonna_  say before you all started acting like tiny primadonnas," he said pointedly, "I think you two idiots are ready to enter the Exams again, get me?" he finished, looking entirely unhappy about even this tiny acknowledgement of their abilities. "Weird power experiments aside."

'Yes!' Daisukenojo punched the air in triumph, shooting to his feet. 'I knew it!'

Ryuu snickered, but his smirk seemed slightly less at someone's expense than usual. So he was probably happy, or his own equivalent.

Raiku, for her part, sagged with relief and rubbed her stinging ear. Thank god. All of her taunting and inferiority-complex building had paid off. Or maybe it had been unnecessary all along, but she chose not to believe that based on how much bodily harm she'd suffered for it, so.

"But we've gotta train hard before then! We don't have much time, get me?!" Yamada demanded, his bloodthirsty grin making all of them step back reflexively. "You know what that means!"

Raiku raised her hand. 'I've already passed the Exams, though.'

Yamada was unstoppable, like always. "Where's your sense of teamwork, Speedy?! You little cretins aren't leaving this field until you sweat  _blood_ , get me?! Let's go, let's go, let's go!"

Raiku dropped her arm and groaned.

She'd had to try.

 

 

 

 

 

_Iwao,_

_Well excuse me for being nowhere near Jounin level. I hope I don't sound offended. That was genuine. I'm sorry. I haven't had any Chuunin missions, still! I don't think I'm bad at strategy, and even though I'm scared, I kind of want a chance to do something! I've been training really hard for a few years now and I really want it to actually be worth something. I'm still scared, though. It's kind of confusing. I'm going to ask Kakashi to maybe look for a mission to start out on, but he's away for a few weeks, so it'll have to wait until then. I'd like to be useful too, but not in a scary way? That may be hard. I am scared of most things._

_You're not creepy! I assume. It's really an empty platitude until I see you, which will hopefully be soon, but I'm sure you're not! You're so nice! You did save my life that one time though. Maybe you're super intimidating in person? Also the twins sound kind of terrifying, you shouldn't try to be like them. I will let you know if you're creepy when I see you, but I'm sure you're not! Very sure! Please let me know when you're coming, so I can warn my dad. He's all weird about boys._

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

'Yo.'

Raiku restrained her shriek by flailing away and biting her lip hard, hand pressed over her racing heart as she tried to recover from the surprise.

Personal growth. It was only slightly horrifying.

'No scream?' Kakashi asked, leaning against the bridge's guard rail beside her.

'No,' she said with forced evenness, taking a few slow, deep breaths. 'Nope. Not here.'

He creased his eye at her.  _Just wait_ , that look promised.  _The day is young._

'So! Where are we training today?' she asked when she felt her heart wasn't about to  _take a flying leap out of her chest_. Stupid Kakashi. 'Forest of Doom?'

'Death. Forest of  _Death_ ,' he corrected mildly, seeming to be content to just enjoy the sunshine.

She tried very hard not to glare at him. 'So, there?'

'Nope,' he drew out, popping the "p" because he knew it annoyed her and that was just the weird dynamic they had.

'So... where?' she prompted, when he seemed to feel no real reason to explain himself.

'We're not.'

Raiku was sure she'd misheard. 'We're... not? Not training?'

Kakashi shook his head, looking out over the river.

'...Just today?' she tried, suddenly unsure of what was going on.

He shook his head again.

Raiku felt something perilously close to hurt. 'Are you... not going to be my teacher anymore?' she asked in a smaller voice.

'We're going on a mission together,' he said instead of answering her, and he could have professed his undying love and left her no more surprised.

'A mission?!' she exclaimed. Or tried to. It came out as more of a squeak. 'Together?'

He nodded. 'It's low-level. A man in a regional town is getting a lot of attention.' He glanced at her. 'They say he can see the future.'

Raiku raised her eyebrows. 'But that's impossible.'

Kakashi shrugged. 'People are listening to him. It's enough to check him out. He's probably a con-artist, but people are listening to him.'

'But we're...' Raiku trailed off, then moved forward to lean against the rail again, beside Kakashi. It made no sense to listen to some rural rumours of some mystical guy. Seeing the future was supposed to be impossible...

But it wouldn't have been the first time someone did something thought impossible. 'We're checking to make sure he's not actually someone with an unknown bloodline limit, aren't we?' Raiku asked after she'd puzzled through it.

Kakashi smiled, which meant she'd at least gotten  _something_  right.  **  
**

A thought occurred. 'But why take me? I'm... I sort of stick out,' she hedged.

'If he's hard to find, it might be useful to have you there.'

That just made no sense at all. 'That makes no sense at all,' Raiku echoed, and damn, she'd been doing so well at not just blurting things out!

While she scolded herself for the lapse, Kakashi pushed off the rail to stand back. 'There's something funny about him.' He eyed her. Having one eye made this no less effective. 'Sometimes Gairano have a weird knack for finding weird people.'

Raiku stared, open-mouthed with shock. 'I've never heard that!'

Kakashi ignored her, like he did whenever she said something he found irrelevant. 'We'll leave in a week. Make sure you're ready.'

He vanished in a flash, leaving Raiku staring into open space.

... People thought Gairano had a knack for something...?

She narrowed her eyes. There was only one person to ask about that.

 

 

 

 

 

_Raiku,_

_I hope your mission goes well._

_Iwao_

 

 

 

 

 

'So I heard something weird from Kakashi,' Raiku brought up once she'd successfully cornered her father. Ordinarily not a difficult task, but her father had a way of knowing when she wanted to discuss something he didn't want to talk about and could quickly become almost impossible to pin down. Topics that prompted this usually included feelings, Raiku's ever-changing physical landscape and whether or not it had been actually been his turn to sweep the house.

'Did you?' her father asked innocently, from where he was trying to make leaning against a hedge while being  _inside_  a hedge look nonchalant.  _What, this hedge? I hide here every day, it's just a thing I do._  It was one of the few times it was obvious that they were very much related, so Raiku made a note to feel fond of the memory later.

But she had more pressing things to worry about. 'He said that sometimes "Gairano have a strange knack for finding strange people",' she quoted. 'Why?'

She expected him to tense up, but he didn't. In fact, he relaxed and gave a dismissive hand-wave. 'Oh, that.'

'…"That"? What is "that"?' Raiku demanded.

He sighed and stepped out of the hedge. 'It's happened a few times over the years. Every now and again, one of our shinobi family members goes on a mission and finds out that their target is a Character, or attached to a Plot. So occasionally they make the mistake of automatically following the narrative trail to find the person.' He brushed some leaves off his clothes. 'It's quite rare and easily explained away, and it's only when they're new or have impaired judgement, usually.'

This took a moment to sink in.

'Wait. Wait wait wait. Some members of our family have used the Genematrix to… to  _find people_?' Raiku repeated in horror. 'Accidentally?! And they do it often enough that we are…  _known_  to be able to find people?!'

Her father shrugged. 'Not really. It's not consistent, for obvious reasons. People who are just important to other people aren't usually important to the Genematrix, so it doesn't work for most missions. Usually one of us gets dragged along if the assigning officer remembers hearing about it, they can't do it, and then it gets buried again. It's more of an urban myth than anything else. Most people just think it's a rumour we made up to make ourselves seem more interesting.'

Raiku gaped.

'Raiku. This doesn't need to be difficult.' Her father rolled his eyes. 'You won't be able to use the Genematrix to find your target anyway, because of the time-skip's rearranging of key people. There's no chance that the person you'll be sent to find is important to the Plot, because everyone who  _is_  is being carefully corralled into their proper places. They don't realistically expect you to know where this person is anyway, or they would have sent you alone.'

Raiku was still stuck on the blatant misuse of their abilities getting unwanted attention, so she didn't really know how to respond.

'Oh, and one more thing, while I have you here,' her father added, like he had been the one to find her skulking around the shrubbery. 'You need to keep an eye on your pacing. The time-skip's winding down, but it'll still be a bit jarring when Naruto gets back. Things are getting closer together, you've probably noticed.'

Raiku mulled this over and compared her memories of the past year to the ones of the year before it, and nodded.

'There we go. Your little sub-stories are probably closing off, you're remembering things that you shouldn't have been able to forget in the first place—that's called Foreshadowing, by the way, another Genematrix trap you need to watch out for—and it's all very standard,' he assured her.

Raiku rubbed her face. That did explain the whole Mura mess. 'So things are going back to normal?'

'Well, for a given value of normal.' Her dad frowned, like a thought had occurred, and suddenly cursed.

Raiku jumped. 'What?! What was that for?!'

'There goes my monthly Exposition quota!' he complained, pulling out a tiny notebook and jotting something down. 'Damn. How am I supposed to talk to the Hokage if I can't even tell her half-truths?'

Raiku stared at him. He seemed genuinely upset by the thought of not being able to continue his weird little antagonistic dance with Tsunade for the next month.

'You know,' she said eventually, 'sometimes I think Ryuu is right. Maybe we are weird.'

Her father frowned and made another quick note. 'I don't see how that's called for.'

 

 

 

 

 

_Iwao,_

_Well that was, uh, brief. You certainly got right to the point there! So I guess I'm left to ask: how are you? I am fine! I've been training extra hard to make sure I'm ready for my mission, but Kakashi has been trying to make me more stealthy. I'm... I'm not stealthy. Well, not like a person should be? I am almost impossible to sense, chakra-wise, unless you are very familiar with me already! In which case you also know that I am horrible at things and I'm doomed. I stick out naturally, but as long as I have some hair dye or someone to use a Henge for me, that is also fixable! Especially since most people don't really know what I look like. Also my eyes give me away._

_I'm bad at stealth, is what I'm saying, because I can't blend in. But I can sneak up on people really well if I don't have to hide in plain sight!_

_What did your teammates end up being up to? Have you found out yet? Mine are up to no good, as per usual, but they're getting pretty intense now that their Exams are coming up. I won't be there, but I'm sure they'll do great._

_Are you still coming to Konoha?_

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

Daisukenojo let out a long sigh. 'So. I guess this is as ready as we're getting.'

Raiku started, finding herself jerked rather violently out of her room by the unsteady flow of time. She took in her surroundings quickly, trying to pretend she had any idea where she was. It was dark-ish, so early evening, and they were ...

She suppressed a sigh of her own. They were sitting on the roof of a tall building on the edge of the village, overlooking the city. Oh good. It was so nice to see that the Genematrix was so invested in their progress that it could do better than  _let's pensively stare over a half-assed metaphor for community and explicitly state where we're going_.

Oh.  _Wait_.

See, this was just sloppy! It had specifically stopped here, completely out of the pacing, so that it could have a nice little segment to finish off their Genin journey together! What the hell?!

Fortunately, neither of her teammates seemed to notice her quiet fuming.

'I think we're ready,' Daisukenojo said, even seeming mostly sure about it.

'You're ready for the Exams,' Raiku said, swinging her feet just so she could do something with all her pent-up, idignant energy. 'You guys'll be fine.'

It was sentimental and stupid of her to say it, because narrative causality demanded that they no longer be Genin. It did not demand that they be Chuunin, and people died during the Exams and oh god, she'd been doing so well at not thinking about it.

'Are you gonna come?' Daisukenojo asked, turning the cap to his water bottle between his hands, and not taking his eyes off it when she turned to look at him. 'To cheer us on, I mean.'

Raiku shifted. 'I would, but—'

'Don't you dare say it's a Gairano thing,' Ryuu cut in. He was looking at her, and she really did find it hard to meet such a direct gaze. It  _was_  a Gairano thing, really, because the last thing any Gairano wanted was to risk seeing their teammates die and to be saddled with that kind of Drama, but she didn't have to say so this time.

She shook her head. 'I have a mission that starts in a few days.'

'A mission?! What, by yourself?!' Daisukenojo sputtered. 'That's insane!'

Raiku leaned back and away from his sudden and intense indignation. 'No! No, not by myself! And it's just to… look around! I swear!'

'"Look around"?' Ryuu's voice was too close. Why did she always sit in the middle, what was  _wrong_  with her? 'You're terrible at stealth. You're too conspicuous for recon work.'

She shrugged helplessly. 'They wanted me to go!'

Daisukenojo was glaring. It was incongruous on such an ordinarily inoffensive face. 'Where?'

'You know I can't tell you that! Because you're Genin,' she added, hoping that their anger at being reminded of her higher rank would change the subject, 'and I'm a Chuunin and you're not. Because I'm better than you.'

Daisukenojo drew breath to yell and she heard a low growl from behind her, and oh god, she did not like Ryuu being behind her where she couldn't see him or any of the terrible things he was probably doing, but it at least seemed to have worked.

'Nice try.'

That's right, when did her plans  _ever_  work? How had she made Chuunin again?

 _Well_. The Genematrix geared itself up because  _late was better than never_. The Chuunin Exam that Raiku had eventually passed was—

'You can't distract us that easily.'

The light bulb of a nearby streetlight shattered with explosive, frustrated force as even that tiny part of the narrative force of the universe was shoved brutally aside yet again.

'Who are you going with?' Ryuu demanded.

'Kakashi! I'll be fine!' Raiku squeaked, trying to cringe away from both of them at once and having trouble for obvious reasons. 'Really! I'm just worried about you guys, going into the Exams and I won't even be there to see...' she trailed off.

The three of them fell into a strained silence. They'd been lucky last time, but their first Exam had left two of them in hospital, and that was just what they could do to each other. Realistically, Raiku had mostly gotten through by use of sheer destructive capability, because sense of strategy or not, that was the sort of thing you didn't brand a fail. As an incomplete team...

'Are you saying we can't do it?' Daisukenojo asked. He probably meant for it to come out angry, but it sounded a lot more uncertain than Raiku thought he had meant it to.

She quickly tried to reassure him. 'Of course not! I think you guys'll pass, definitely! It's... just dangerous.' It was even true; Daisukenojo and Ryuu would probably have passed the last Exam if not for certain... extenuating circumstances that may or may not have involved or been entirely comprised of Raiku.

Ryuu snorted. 'Dangerous. Like a "routine escort mission to Sand" or "training with Raiku" is so safe.'

Raiku growled. 'That's different!'

'Not really,' Daisukenojo pointed out, seeming to rally a bit when it was put like that. 'Those both were pretty terrible.'

'Hey!'

Ryuu nudged her with his shoulder and must have misjudged the amount of force, because it didn't hurt at all. 'It's not a big deal. We've gone through a lot worse.'

Raiku frowned. 'I know, but...'

'Aw, you have feelings under all that hair!' Daisukenojo cooed, slinging an arm around her shoulders with such a long-used carefulness that it was almost second nature. 'You're worried!'

Raiku flushed. 'No! I'm not worried!' A blatant lie, but she'd be damned if she had feelings in public. 'Who'd be worried about two jerks like you?!'

'You are! Isn't that sweet, Ryuu?'

'It is,' Ryuu agreed, smugness practically oozing off him. 'So sweet.'

Raiku folded her arms across her chest. 'I hope you both die horribly.'

Daisukenojo laughed and hugged her to his side just briefly. 'Yeah, yeah.'

 

 

 

 

 

_Iwao,_

_It's been a while since I got a letter from you? No, it has, I don't know why that question mark is there. Things are still okay over here, but I've been given a mission! I'm sort of looking forward to it, but also sort of nauseated when I think of it. I won't make this long, in case your letter's just been delayed, but please write soon if it hasn't!_

_Unless you don't want to. That would also be fine. Well, I would be sort of upset but please don't feel pressured._

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

It was cheating. It was dirty and dastardly and totally wrong, and it was crossing a line.

'Would you like some more tea?' Ryuu's mother asked.

'Yes please,' Raiku mumbled, sliding her teacup across the table and hoping her mask hid her small, victorious smile.

And it had  _worked_.

Raiku had strolled over to Ryuu's house the second she thought he was far enough away from Konoha that he couldn't stop her, and lo and behold, it had been a success! Ryuu's mother seemed to accept that Raiku wanted to meet Ryuu's family and had apparently forgotten he would be leaving for the Exams before she got there, and had welcomed her inside immediately.

Raiku pulled down her mask and sipped her tea. She hadn't given it enough time to cool down and it immediately scalded the inside of her mouth, but still; it tasted like victory. She savoured the burn.  **  
**

'So, I hear that you're also training with a second teacher! How's that going?' Ryuu's mother— _please, call me Jun_ —asked.

Raiku put down her cup immediately and blushed, yanking her mask back up to try and hide it.

Again.

'It's okay,' she replied, mumbling again but unable to stop herself. The plan may have worked, but she had no idea how to deal with…  _this_. Tsunade and the other women she had encountered had been forceful and terrifying, so she'd known sort of how to respond to them.

Jun was not. She was everything Raiku had no idea how to deal with in women, and it was making finding out Ryuu's secret hidden agenda a very difficult task. Mostly because most of Raiku's blood was dedicated to rushing to her face every few seconds and her vocal chords had been apparently seized by her common sense, who didn't trust her with them.

Jun smiled encouragingly. 'You're still training with Ryuu and Daisukenojo, though. Is it hard spending less time with them? I know you three have probably become very fond of each other.'

Raiku tried very hard not to let out a reflexive snort, because she felt that wouldn't be polite and being polite was probably advisable. Maybe? Mothers surely cared about that sort of thing. Well, they did in all of her sources, but all of her sources were basically the soap opera  _ANBU Romance_ , so.

'I still see them all the time,' she eventually got out.

'I'm glad!' Jun said, and then she nodded and discreetly nudged the plate of biscuits towards Raiku in a way she probably thought was helpful. It just reminded Raiku that she desperately wanted to eat that entire plate of biscuits and probably the plate too, but that would be a bit weird for someone who wasn't used to her, so Raiku desperately tried to get back some conversational momentum. 'Why doesn't Ryuu want us to meet you?'

 _Damn_. So much for subtlety. But she'd never had any realistic expectation that she could keep it up, not being any good at manipulation, so it was better to just rip that delusional band-aid right off.

Jun blinked, obviously taken aback.

'Is he embarrassed by us?' Raiku tried. If she could make it seem like she was just insecure, maybe Jun wouldn't get annoyed.

Luckily, that seemed to work. Jun immediately reached across and touched Raiku's covered arm. 'Oh no, of course not!' she assured her. 'Ryuu's just always been very private; you know how he is.'

Raiku tried very hard not to flinch back from the contact, but her obvious discomfort could only help sell it. 'But it just seems like he really doesn't want us here!'

'Don't be silly,' Jun dismissed. 'He just doesn't want me to embarrass him in front of his friends. He probably  _particularly_  doesn't want me to do it in front of you,' she added in a lower voice, almost to herself rather than Raiku.

Okay. That was a little strange.

'Why me?' she asked warily, because being the exception to any of Ryuu's rules was never, ever a good thing.

Jun tucked some hair behind her ear. 'Well. I mean, you're a girl,' she said, taking a sip of her own tea and looking strangely... something Raiku couldn't identify. Nothing malevolent, but she got the distinct impression she was missing something.

'I... am?' Raiku tried to confirm, only to curse herself when it came out more like a question.

'Yes,' Jun confirmed generously, apparently happy to pretend that she wasn't the only one who knew what was going on in this conversation. 'And you two are close.'

Raiku had a sudden sinking feeling.

'Not that close! Not really,' she quickly responded, grabbing a biscuit and putting it into her mouth whole so that she couldn't be expected to reply immediately to whatever Jun said next.

Jun smiled and  _dear god_ , that was where Ryuu got that knowing look from. 'Oh, it's not a criticism! I think you two are so cute together!' she told her, beaming, and Raiku found herself frozen, mid-chew.

The biscuit was delicious, her tastebuds told her, but that was about all her brain was capable of processing. The words Jun had used were not, individually, offensive, so her mind scrambled to understand why their use in conjunction had suddenly resulted in a cessation of all function.

Raiku swallowed.

After a few seconds of blinking at the table, she stood up. Jun stood up as well, brow wrinkled in concern. 'Raiku? Is everything okay?'

Raiku looked at her, totally blank, and made a small, inarticulate noise, before she wandered towards the doorway. Dazed, she made her way outside, Jun following behind her with a bemused expression until Raiku gave a vague sort of wave and drifted off the property.

She was well into downtown when her mind was finally able to fully process what had just happened.

Raiku nodded to herself, and kept nodding for long enough that she freaked out several passersby, and then she made an executive decision that, since there had been no witnesses, that had never happened. Ryuu never had to know and neither did  _anybody else ever!_

It was only when she found herself the subject of some bewildered looks that she realized she'd just said, or possibly screamed, that out loud.

 

 

 

 

 

_Chapter Eight: True Love (You're An Embarassment)_

_At last! True love has found you. You have located the other human being in this life that was designed to be your very own, and you will now be together forever. I do hope you're enjoying the rush of oxytocin, because believe it or not, that's what this is. "Oh," you're thinking, "you're just cynical! My hormonal love and I are soulmates!" If you have had the desire, the fortitude or possibly the sufficient threat of violence to read this far, however, you should know that I am always right._

_Welcome to teen romance! Most of you will not be unfortunate enough to be stuck with your current partner for life, but it certainly seems wonderful right now. This is largely because, due to a tragic lack of significant character-building obstacles in your life thus far, your personality is largely unformed and very, very fluid. Now that you have someone to attach to, your spinelessness has resulted in your fledgling identities merging into one awful,_ awful _mess._

_I know. I know. Your immediate reaction to this will be to deny everything and swan off into the sunset, like putting this book down will make what I say any less true. Rather than doing that and coming crawling back to me when this inevitably backfires, however, you do have another option:_

_Welcome to teen romance! This can be a valuable learning experience in the mysterious ways of the opposite, or possibly the same, sex. Study your partner. Learn their weaknesses. And their strengths, because if you've read this far, you know that those are just weaknesses with different hats. This will require you to detach from their face, which, I have to say, is the best possible outcome of this, because you're nauseating me, your family and even passing [continued on next page]_

 

 

 

 

 

Kakashi had applied the Henge to her, and it was impossible for it to be itchy, but it somehow still was.

Kakashi smacked her hand away from her collar when she tried to rub at the skin underneath it, yet again. 'Stop it. People are going to think you have fleas.'

Raiku stuffed her hand in her pocket, feeling a jolt of unease when she could only see skin. It wasn't even  _her_  skin; underneath the Henge she was fully covered, but their disguises were of two obviously related people, brown-haired and blue-eyed, wearing ordinarily clothes. And ordinary clothes didn't cover every inch of a person.

She knew objectively that she wasn't going to hurt anyone, that it was just an illusion, but the anxiety was making her sick.

She dropped back to walk just behind Kakashi when the crowd got too thick for her to stay by his side, following the path he wove through in the throng of people at market.

She hated this town.

Tanzaku Town was known for its gambling and for its... other things, and Orochimaru had famously left its only child-friendly tourist attraction completely destroyed. Its popularity seemed to have recovered since then, since the main street was bustling and noisy, air unclean with the steam and smoke of the small food stalls nearby. The crowd they were walking through was mostly comprised of older men and most of them were pushy, and it was hot and it smelled unfamiliar and Raiku was uneasy and sick and she  _hated_  it.

When the feelings of strange and alien and  _unwelcome_  threatened to overwhelm, she reached out and gripped the back of Kakashi's shirt, ignoring the way he tensed slightly. It wasn't grown-up, she knew, but she wasn't grown, not really, and she'd do what she had to do get through this. And sure, he didn't look like himself but it was still him under there, and she trusted that he knew what he was doing.

Kakashi veered left suddenly and almost twisted her wrist off in the process, forcing her to contort awkwardly to avoid breaking her arm. She had no idea how she was supposed to see if their target was dangerous just by looking at him, especially when she couldn't even—

They abruptly lurched free of the crowd, the stuffy closeness giving way to slightly fresher air. Raiku took a reassuringly deep breath. She realized she was still holding onto Kakashi's shirt and... didn't let go, she was embarassed to admit, because he was reassuringly solid even when he looked every inch the portly, middle-aged civilian.

Raiku looked away from him when he didn't take another step, glanced around them and almost gave herself a heart-attack.

Plot.

 _Everywhere_.

It was almost enough for her to declare her promotion to Chuunin a huge mistake and go running (and screaming all the way) home, because Naruto had to be there and she just wasn't equipped to deal with him. Oddly, it was her grip on the Copy-nin that kept her anchored in place, though she knew she could let go at any time.

She steeled herself and willed herself to look past it. On this closer inspection, which she applied only under the greatest of duress, it was... weird. What she had thought was one enormous Plot was actually just... a whole bunch of really little ones, usually only attached to one person or two, at the most. She stared in open fascination that earned her an elbow to the ribs from Kakashi, and schooled her features into a less manic look before he moved forward again.

She couldn't help looking around, though, as they walked, because... they were really everywhere. She'd never seen such a large concentration of them before. She'd heard about it happening, obviously; the Genematrix only had so many Devices to use, so usually small Plots blended together or used each other as springboards to launch their events, but ... surely this was excessive?

Still, it was kind of a relief to see that her father had been right. There was nothing for her to follow the target with, Plot-wise, so this could only be another nail in the coffin of  _that_  rumor.  **  
**

She walked into Kakashi's back when he suddenly stopped, then quickly stepped around to see what he was looking at, thoroughly glad that she had two layers on over her blush.

"Know Your Future!", invited the sign she found herself looking at. A little lacking in subtlety, she supposed, but she wasn't really able to criticize them for that. She took the hint and slipped past the people milling around and blocking the entrance, finally able to use her negligible body mass to her advantage.

Once she got inside, it became almost impossible to see. Raiku coughed, choking on nothing except the overwhelming presence of Plot, making her feel penned in even by the eager hands of narrative. Luckily, once her initial surge of panic had died down, the Plots around her were weak enough to be repelled by the sheer fact that she was a Gairano, and didn't seem that interested.

Thank god for small mercies.

She sensed Kakashi nearby and ducked her head down, pushing carefully through the crowd to try and get to him. She tried breathing through her mouth to make the smell of other humans less offensive, because it wouldn't do to admit that she didn't really like how people smelled in general, even ones as generally inoffensive as these.

When she finally rejoined him, she found him casually looking over the crowd, which was all very clearly surrounding one man, set apart.

Raiku tilted her head, eyes watering a little from trying to see through all the Plots at once to the actual people underneath. They guy they were sent to look at was a little blurry, but it had to be him. It was the only thing that made sense. Unsurprisingly, he didn't have a Plot of his own, and Raiku breathed a sigh of relief. Without one, it was impossible for him to even be filler, and that boded well for her first real mission. In fact, he looked… ordinary. He looked totally normal, and basically seemed the picture-perfect civilian, from having an appropriate amount of muscle tone to wearing clothes that slightly restricted movement. He had a normal chakra reading, as far as she could tell, and there was nothing to suggest that he was anything special. Maybe they genuinely did just think that he gave good advice?

'He's just talking,' she muttered to Kakashi.

Kakashi nodded.

Raiku couldn't sense metal on him. He said something and a ripple of laughter crossed the people nearest him, their Plots shaking slightly—and that was weird to see, but that was the thing about influence. If you had enough of it, the weaker strains of narrative causality could be persuaded. All they were, when they were at their most basic and weakest level, was a pattern, so they just shifted into a different one. The ending was always the same, but the route could change. Unless that route intersected with Naruto. Then it may as well have been set in concrete.

But again, it was nothing really unusual. She'd ask her dad to be sure, but realistically, this was just a very good con.

'He's just a guy?' she finally concluded.

'We'll stick around for a few days,' Kakashi said quietly, and from the curious tension around his eyes, she got the impression he was seeing the man in a way she couldn't. 'But yeah. Doesn't seem special.'

Coming from Kakashi, who was all about seeing beyond the surface, Raiku felt she could trust that assessment. She almost had a heart-attack when she noticed someone nearby listening in, but when the guy just snorted and nodded to himself, she realized that their conversation sounded sceptical, rather than strategic.

Not that there was a lot of strategy here. Actually, this... seemed...

Raiku froze.

'Wait. Wait. Am I right in thinking,' she whispered, trying desperately to keep her voice below the level anyone else could hear, 'that you dragged me into another country as  _practice_? We're just here to teach me how to  _look at people_?!'

Kakashi smiled slightly, totally innocent.

Raiku swelled in outrage, opening her mouth to speak, but he turned and clapped his hand over it.

'Important skills,' he said mildly, and winked at her because he was an asshole who just wanted to come to Tanzaku Town, probably.

Raiku knew it wasn't worth it. She  _knew_  it wasn't.

She bit him anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

_Iwao,_

_You've haven't replied in a while. I don't want to be paranoid! I swear! It's okay if you're busy!_

_But you are okay, aren't you?_

_Raiku_

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku woke from the heavy sleep of someone forced to spend any time with Kakashi, to a sharp and inexplicable drop in the temperature of all the air surrounding her entire house.

Which meant only one thing.

'They're back!'

Raiku's joyful cry could probably have been heard from space, but it was definitely heard by her father down in the living room. He responded by grumbling into his coffee, ignoring her as she sprinted past. 'They passed! They aren't gonna die yet!' she yelled on the way through, jumping clear over the couch and smacking her shoulder against the doorframe when she didn't take the turn sharply enough. She ignored it and grabbed her shoes on the way out instead of putting them on, so that she wouldn't lose time, ducking around relatives out attending to their daily business and making for the gate.

She stepped off a nearby fence to jump to the top of the compound wall, shading her eyes and squinting down the road to where she could sort of feel them coming from.

There! One enormous person and two other blurry shapes, one with offensively bright hair! Yes!

Raiku stretched onto her tiptoes and waved as obviously as possible, trying to make herself as visible as she could. She couldn't make out their faces at that distance, but the green vests that both of her teammates were wearing were clear from even so far away, and she could almost have burst with pride at the sight of it. She jumped down and landed on the slope, skidding slightly but keeping balance all the way to the bottom until she jumped onto the path, waving yet again. They had made Chuunin! That meant they could live! She broke into a jog in her haste to reach and congratulate them, just as Naruto did the same as he approached Konoha on the other side of the village and really…

She had been warned.

But Raiku had grown so used to the whirlwind that was the time-skip, her perception of the passing of weeks and months so accustomed to that one temporal setting that when Naruto set foot in Konoha, the impact of the Genematrix's violent application of the brakes sent her crashing to the ground before she could even open her mouth to say hello.

'Oh  _come on_!'

"Goddamn, Speedy!"

'Raiku?!' Daisukenojo's voice penetrated the haze. 'Raiku, can you hear me?!'

'I swear to god, if she's going to go insane again, I'm moving,' Ryuu's more acidic voice informed the world at large. 'I'll just leave.'

'Shuddup,' Raiku slurred, reaching one hand out and batting at Daisukenojo's blurry, concerned face. 'Shhhh'sfine! C'ngrats!'

'You  _idiot_. Ryuu, she's blacking out, hurry up and help!'

'Why is it me, why is it  _always_  me,' Raiku heard Ryuu grumbling, right before she lost consciousness entirely.


	55. exposition and pretty faces

Raiku came to with a groan, raising a hand to her throbbing head.

When she at last managed to get her eyes open enough to make out his features through the light behind him, the face of a stranger swam into view.

'What the hell was that?' a distinctly male voice demanded.

Raiku pressed away, only succeeding in squishing herself a little further into the dirt.

The young man raised his eyebrows. Somehow, aggressively.

A hand abruptly shoved his face to the side and out of her immediate range of vision. 'Get out of the way,' a rather lower voice instructed. It wasn't one she knew, per se, but it was… oddly familiar.

Raiku's brain, though still muzzy, was slowly adjusting to the abrupt end of the time skip. It was also, probably not coincidentally, beginning to suspect something rather unpleasant.

The suspicion was confirmed seconds later, when someone else appeared.

No matter how different he looked, Ryuu was always going to be Ryuu. 'How many fingers am I holding up?' he demanded, and his voice had  _definitely_  not been that deep before she'd woken up.

Stricken with horror and shock, Raiku just stared when he held up two fingers in front of her.

What.

What.

 _What_.

Ryuu narrowed his eyes slightly and his mouth opened, probably to insult her, when—

'What happened to your face?' she blurted out.

She heard a bark of laughter and  _that guy had been Daisukenojo what the_ _ **hell** —_

'Excuse me?' Ryuu asked, and she was too busy staring at him to really pay attention to his tone for once.

He was… he was…

Older.

Ryuu had always had angular features, but where he had previously had any sort of juvenile roundness had smoothed off into…

'Why are you so pretty?' she squeaked, unable to tear her eyes off him.

Ryuu's stupidly pretty face darkened with anger, but it didn't really make a difference to the overall effect. Suddenly desperate to take in her surroundings, Raiku shoved him aside (ignoring the resulting cry of anger) and sat up.

'Daisuke?!' she demanded of the young redhead standing a few feet away. Dear god, it had to be him. Daisukenojo could always be recognised by the freckles, but he was so much broader than he should have been?! Where had he gotten time to be muscular! 'Still shorter than me!' she cried, pointing at him. Still had offensively red hair, was still covered in freckles, but he was very distinctly…

Raiku scrambled to her feet and backed away from the two of them, though this forced her to keep looking at them.

'She's gone insane,' Daisukenojo announced, sticking his hands in his pockets. 'We all knew this day would come. Again.'

Raiku looked him up and down, willing him to lose a foot in height and go back to wearing his Genin clothes. He… he had been, only seconds ago!

There was only one way to deal with this sort of radical life change.

 

 

 

 

 

'Raiku.'

Raiku sat with her back against her closed bedroom door, arms folded stubbornly over her chest.

Her dad knocked on the door again. 'Raiku, we have to talk about this,' he informed her, voice muffled slightly by the wood. 'I can explain. I already did,' he added somewhat sullenly in a quieter voice, 'but I can again.' He was offering to go further into Exposition debt, like that would help his case.

'You didn't tell me that my teammates would morph into adults when the time-skip ended!' she complained. 'Didn't it  _hurt_? They've grown by feet! In seconds!'

She couldn't hear him sigh, but he definitely did. 'That isn't what happened. I did say your perception of time would change,' he added reproachfully.

Raiku glared at the air in front of her, in lieu of her dad, who was still blocked by the door. 'Yes! To go  _faster_!'

'Not just that, I never said that!' He tried the doorknob again. 'Let me in. They're waiting downstairs and I don't want to have to yell. Especially with your creepy teammate in the house. Ruin.'

'Ryuu.'

'I know what I said.'

Reluctantly, Raiku pulled herself up and unlocked the door, pulling it open so her father could get inside. He sat on one end of the bed and she the other.

'You knew that you had to be ready for the time-skip to be over,' he pointed out after a few minutes of silence.

'I was! Almost!' she said defensively. He held up a hand.

'Regardless of how ready you were, you had to have noticed how you weren't noticing your teammates in the last year.'

Raiku, as a Gairano, was very accustomed to strange sentences. But that was a new one. ' _What_?'

Her dad flicked his fingers in a characteristic dismissive gesture, but he was obviously put-out at being forced to explain every step of this process more than once. 'Time-skip. It's about skipping ahead for Naruto, so at the end—'

'I know all that already!' Raiku interrupted, and he shot her a narrow glare.

' _So at the end_ ,' he continued, 'everybody looks noticeably different. It's the Genematrix's way of gauging and then displaying the progression of time, so that no one questions why the last few years went so fast. There's physical proof of linear progression.'

Raiku carefully studied him. '…You don't look different.'

He smiled smugly. 'Thank you. But it's been making you ignore how your teammates have been physically changing, so that now the time-skip is over, it suddenly hits you how everybody's growing up, everything's different, etcetera, etcetera, milestones!' He fanned his fingers out like a magician, effect ruined by his obvious lack of pizzazz.

Only there was a problem. 'Wait. Why don't I look different?!'

He gave her a strange look. 'You do.'

Raiku blanched and her hands shot up to touch her face. It was still her face, she decided after a few seconds of panicked feeling around. That was definitely her normal nose and those were, on closer inspection, her eyebrows. She tugged at her hair and that was still white and completely unmanageable and everywhere-

'Not much,' her father allowed. 'But you do look a little more… grown-up.'

By the end of his sentence, he looked perilously close to experiencing an emotion. Eager to stop  _that_  before it could get started, she tried to clarify matters. 'So what you're saying is that my teammates,' she said slowly, still working through it, 'have been growing and changing for the last three years the way they were supposed to, like everybody is supposed to,' like everybody, who, during the time-skip, also seemed to look exactly as they had before the time-skip, she was starting to realize, 'and … I've only been able to notice little bits of it?'

Her father nodded. 'Exactly.'

The horror of this situation finally hit her. 'So … now that it's over, I have to relearn what everybody looks like?!'

'It's for narrative reasons, I know it's a bit strange to get your head around,' her father said with a shrug. He patted her on the shoulder and stood up. 'Come on then. Time to go pretend you've just had a bump on the head when you fell.'

Raiku gaped at him in undisguised horror. '… How can you be so blasé about this?' she asked after a few indulgent seconds of dwelling on this awfulness.

Her father shrugged again. 'It's just how things are.'

After taking another few seconds to calm herself down and process  _that_ , Raiku followed him out the door and down the stairs.

'This is good tea. Thank you,' Daisukenojo said to her father, from her kitchen table, which she now regarded as the nexus of all evil in her life. An idea only reinforced by how she was now forced to notice how her squeaky teammate's voice was deeper and strangely rough. Probably from all the yelling at Yamada doing damage to his vocal chords over the years. She began to notice how his hands were broad and immediately cut the thought off, refusing to acknowledge his physical changes.

If she could just ignore them, she decided, it would be less traumatic.

Tragically, her father had other plans.

'You're welcome, Hatori,' her dad replied cheerfully, almost bodily shoving her into the room and in the redhead's direction, forcing her to look at him.

It hit with the narrative inevitability of a Naruto Speech.

Daisukenojo.

Daisukenojo had always been short. He had always looked even younger than he was, with a slightly round but mostly inoffensive face. He had worn shorts and a t-shirt and he was more freckle than human. She knew this. She knew exactly what Daisukenojo was.

Daisukenojo was  _not_  some… average-height, square-jawed young man with, with biceps! She eyed his biceps with an alarm that bordered perilously close to hostility. When had this happened?! That didn't just happen!

But she had noticed him getting more muscle-y, she remembered distantly. She had. She just hadn't…? His hair was longer, long enough to actually be proper hair, but still close to his skull. He was wearing a green flak vest, because they were Chuunin, which was great, but not really her priority right now, and black knee-length shorts. Like a bastard. And of course he was reasonably good-looking, in a rather unusually masculine sort of way, because he was a shinobi and they were never really ugly  _goddamnit._

At least he was still shorter than her, she noticed, confirming her earlier (screamed) observation. Wait.

_Wait._

Raiku hastily stepped closer to her dad and measured herself against him. When this informed her he was now a little less than an inch shorter than her, some part of her that clung to traditional ideals of femininity died a swift death. 'I'm taller than you,' she hissed, looking  _down at her father_.

'You have been for a while, honey,' he gritted out through his suddenly strained smile. Her father was tall. Tall-ish. Not Kakashi tall, but a little over average height.

Which made her  _freakishly tall_.

Raiku staggered into a chair and let her head fall back to gaze upwards in supplication for a sudden death from above.

'Everything is terrible,' she moaned.

'You're terrible,' Ryuu retorted. She knew it had to be him, because Ryuu could go die in a fire. And also because she'd heard his voice earlier, probably. It was almost incongruously deep for such a lean boy— _young man_ , oh  _god—_ but his snarky tone was rather distinctive.

She decided to look at Yamada next.

He was exactly the same. Which, now that she thought about it, was still the size of about eight people and covered in scars, like those unsettling ones around his mouth, so she quickly bit the bullet and looked at…

At…

_Ryuu._

Her father pushed a glass of water into her hands, and she very nearly dropped it.

 _Ryuu._  Ryuu should not have been allowed to exist, she decided then and there. Still, she had to get this over with, so she started at the top.

Ryuu's hair was still grey, and it was still perfect. And oh look, she observed, feeling resigned; so were his eyelashes! Raiku, whose eyelashes were nothing of the sort (as far as she was aware), felt cheated.

Anyway, the Genematrix reminded her, realisation sliding over her mind like oil. Ryuu looked … well, he looked his age, actually, but while the cast of his features would always, somehow, be predatory and his eyes would always be eerie, the boyishness was mostly gone. It left only sharp and strangely handsome, almost beautiful features. He was lean and obviously taller than her even with both of them sitting down, all sharp angles that should have made him look gawky and ridiculous but instead combined with the pushed-back hair and tan to just…

Raiku glared. Ryuu returned her look of animosity with a far more effective one, his malevolence not diminished in any way by the fact he was looking at her with eyes framed with ridiculously lovely eyelashes. At least his eyes, once mostly brown but now, probably through Drama, a vivid yellow, were still creepy. Tearing her eyes away from his face, she noticed he was wearing black. Of course he was. Of course, unlike Raiku, who looked even skinnier in black, he just looked edgy. Even with the green flak vest, which should have clashed horribly with the entire colour scheme. Which it definitely did on Raiku.

Raiku looked down at herself, pulling her flak vest away to peer down. Her chest was hardly impressive, and she was scrawny as ever. Wait, maybe a little less so? But definitely right on that sight of the spectrum.

She frowned. She'd gotten a little more tall and a lot more traumatized. What a bargain.

"If Speedy's done with her little episode, I think some congratulations are in order, get me?" Yamada said pointedly.

'What, why?' she asked blankly, after taking a second to realise he was talking to her.

'You've got to be kidding me,' Daisukenojo said, pulling at his own flak vest and giving her a meaningful look.

Embarrassingly, she didn't immediately cotton on to his point, staring at the vest like it held the answers.

Which it eventually did, but still. 'Oh. Oh!' She remembered. 'You're Chuunin!'

'Thank you!' Daisukenojo said, throwing up his hands. ' _Finally_.'

'Con…gratulations!' she added, feeling she wasn't giving it the proper level of enthusiasm. 'Yaaaay!' she drew out, but she realised when she heard herself that it was rather lacking. Still, Daisukenojo looked rather proud at her praise, so—

'Thanks. Your enthusiasm is heartwarming.'

Goddamn  _Ryuu_.

'Oh, and what was that, earlier?' he asked, tucking his hands into his vest pockets and slouching artfully. 'I can accept the flimsy head trauma excuse for your crazy,' and why had they let him be the medic,  _why_  had they ever thought that would be a good idea, 'but why'd you faint?'

'I,' Raiku began slowly, 'have. Been. Waiting! For you guys to get home! And… not sleeping much! So,' she glanced at Yamada and Daisukenojo to see if they were buying this frankly insulting attempt at a cover, 'when you guys arrived, I… I guess it caught up with me!'

Luckily, her forehead protector and mask covered up the nervous sweat she'd broken into.

Ryuu's catlike eyes flattenedwith disbelief. But he tilted his head back slightly in what was obviously a capitulation, because, she realised with relief, like hell were they going to take her on in her dad's kitchen.

'So!' her dad piped up, finally intervening. 'You guys should go out and celebrate!'

Raiku seized the out with both hands. 'Yeah! We should! Definitely, you guys have done really well, so we should go and celebrate with lunch or something or you know we could-,'

'Yeah, yeah,' Daisukenojo said, waving it off. He was still reassuringly practical and had clearly given up on this losing battle, obviously still proud of himself and unwilling to let her idiosyncrasies ruin the day. 'Dumplings?'

'I like dumplings,' Raiku agreed hastily, standing up from the table. 'Let's go! I'll pay for one other person!'

"And that'll be me," Yamada added, getting to his feet. She looked away, because  _man_  that was unsettling to look at with new eyes. Like meeting him all over again, his every movement seemed threatening; he was just too large to be real, so physically powerful that each action had a curious grace, so carefully he had to hold himself back. Just seeing him getting up was like watching a mountain go for a stroll, and it had taken her years to get over flinching every time he looked at her! Back at square one!

While Raiku lamented the loss of years of accumulated desensitization, she missed the rather more practical side of things, which was that Yamada ate the most, right up there with her, and the other two were already looking more cheerful.

Vengeance wasn't usually this straightforward, so every now and again it was refreshing.

'Alright,' Ryuu said, letting his chair fall back onto four legs. Raiku hadn't even noticed how he'd tipped it back, so busy taking in the overall picture of insouciance that she'd missed the minor details. Wow, she marvelled. That was quite a strong Drama-induced effect he had going on there. Her father caught her eye and they shared a moment of narrative wariness; Ryuu was, as always, going to be trouble.

But for now, he was going to lunch with the rest of them. Well, not technically lunch anymore. Afternoon snack? Late lunch, early dinner? It was sort of an awkward time; her fainting had eaten up longer than she'd anticipated. An afternoonish meal, she decided, because she couldn't spend too long on that.

'I'll be back for dinner,' she said to her dad, who immediately smiled. He had her back.

'Oh, don't worry about it! You guys have a lot of catching up to do. Maybe get some training in, gotta stay sharp!'

He had a  _knife in her back_ , that rat bastard. Raiku only just managed not to lunge across the table at him when Yamada brightened with sadistic glee. "Good idea, Gairano!"

Daisukenojo groaned. 'Perfect, just perfect.'

'Yeah, dad. Perfect,' Raiku gritted out, glare shooting daggers at him as Yamada put a hand on her shoulder and steered her out into the hallway. Her father followed them, probably in equal parts due to wanting to gloat and wanting to make sure Ryuu actually left.

'You have fun!' he said with a cheerful smile and a wave, so normal-looking, so completely innocent, so not showing the depths of his sadistic madness. **  
**

Raiku shook her head and pulled her shoes on, avoiding with ease the scuffling match that Ryuu and Daisukenojo broke into when one leaned too far into the other's space while pulling on their own footwear. By the time she straightened, something had occurred to her.

Vengeance wasn't usually this straightforward, so every now and again it was refreshing.

'Thanks for talking some sense into me, dad,' Raiku said, tone mild and pleasant. And then, because they were Gairano and they were notoriously bad at subtlety even when discussing their own Exposition quotas, she thought she'd better be safe and add, 'I know it took a lot of explaining!'

The door closed on his expression of dismayed realization, and Raiku laughed all the way down the hill.


	56. tender loving care

'So!' Raiku said brightly, hands folded on the table in front of her. 'What's next?' Life was moving on and by god, she was going to keep up this time.

It was some consolation that it couldn't be more training. That's what the entire time-skip had been about. If she did one more push-up, she would weep blood. She was as prepared as she reasonably could be, she had braved the whirlwinds of personal development and the Copy-nin, and it was time to move on.

'Well,' Daisukenojo mused, perusing the menu. 'I was thinking about some of those little dough things, what're they called-,'

'I meant in general!' Raiku paused. '…But yes, we are definitely getting those.' While the little dough-things were undeniably important, the time-skip wouldn't end at a mere team lunch. Something was going to happen. She was filled with equal parts dread and excitement, a feeling she had become accustomed to over the terrifying years of puberty. And also her whole life.

Yamada eyed her suspiciously. "Why do you ask?"

Raiku tried a wide-eyed, innocent look. Hers had never been very good, but she had spent several years staring at Kakashi's version and never quite broken him. And indeed, Yamada met it with a glower that she heavily suspected he'd been born with, but eventually relented. Yes, Raiku thought; Kakashi finally taught me something useful.

"We've got something lined up already," Yamada informed them begrudgingly.

'I knew it!' Raiku exclaimed, hitting the table. 'Called it! Called it!'

Ryuu batted one of her flailing limbs out of his direct line of vision. 'Shut up so he can tell us about it.'

But Yamada hardly needed Ryuu to fight his battles for him, just carrying on. "Some small-time criminals have been stirring up trouble along patrol routes, get me?"

Raiku frowned. Not exactly groundbreaking. In fact, it was sort of weird?

But anything she noticed, Ryuu could be counted on to pick up on first, because he was a smug asshole. 'That's the patrol's problem. That is, in fact, the sort of problem that patrols are for,' Ryuu pointed out.

"Yeah, only no," Yamada shot back along with a dark glare promising retribution for any further interruptions. "Our patrols are having trouble and they think there might be something bigger behind it, get me?"

Raiku discreetly preened; she'd been right.

Wait. She'd been  _right_.

She groaned and hid her face in her hands. 'Of course. So now we have to go and investigate this mysterious problem with  _hidden depths_!' "Hidden depths". Swearwords in the large and strange Gairano vocabulary.

The one time she was indisputably right! Why couldn't she just have this one thing?! Why did it always have to be terrible if she saw it coming?!

"Got it in one," Yamada grinned.

'But,' Daisukenojo said to himself slowly, still reading the menu, totally at ease with the entire situation, probably secure in the knowledge his more histrionic teammates would bitch enough to get the truth out. '… the dough-things only come in sets of three…'

'If they're taking out actual patrols, why would they send three newbies and only one Jounin?' Ryuu asked, leaning back in his chair with an attractively brooding expression that Raiku eyed with blatant hostility. 'Isn't that a job for White Ops?'

Yamada folded his arms and brooded in a reassuringly less photogenic way. "They aren't taking them out, or they'd send some people who actually know what they're doing."

'Ouch,' Daisukenojo said absently, turning the page to peruse side-dishes for something less likely to start a fight.

'So… what's the trouble they're causing?' Raiku asked, braced for impact. Just in time, too- Yamada opened his mouth and Plot materialised on his exhale in the empty space in front of them. It waved at her. Or at least undulated in an attention-grabbing way, even giving a little showy wiggle where it now took up most of the table. She managed not to recoil, but did lean back and pretend to be pensive as an excuse. Settling back and brooding was a thing! A thing that finally worked to her advantage!

The Plot was oddly difficult to analyse, even at this distance. The usual flashes of light and snatches of words were absent, though it certainly seemed as stupidly smug as the other members of its family.  _Oh hey_ , it announced with its… best attempt at jazz hands, the little shit. But realistically, she knew what this was. Introducing all the characters, establishing limits emotional and physical, setting up framing…

Raiku sighed. She couldn't squish it when it was right there. Even for her, randomly stabbing the table would be a bit out of the ordinary.

Bam. Yamada got his Exposition on, right on cue. "There've been some natural disturbances in the area. Somehow, these guys seem to know when and where they'll happen, and they've been leading our guys into them and then making off with what they can grab, get me?"

'But they aren't causing them?' Ryuu asked sceptically. 'That's a pretty big coincidence you're asking us to buy.'

Yamada smiled grimly. "Exactly. We've gotta go check it out."

Raiku rubbed her temples, just to have an excuse to close her eyes against the oily black mass of Plot that was staring her in the face, mocking her inability to do anything about it just yet. 'Where?'

Yamada shrugged. "Our lead starts only about a day away. Well inside Fire, don't worry."

Raiku narrowed her eyes. Only she should be worried. The end of the time-skip made her narrative protection flimsy at best, and she could no longer risk accepting the Plots that threatened them as small-time. After all, that hadn't worked out so well… historically. Things were going to be building up and spilling over from the Main Plot, so she'd have to ask her dad about it.

But he surely would have told her. And actually, he'd said Team Seven's storyline starting would mark the end of the time-skip, so…

She brightened. That meant they would be far away from her!

"We'll head out once you sad-sacks have recovered from the Exam, get me?"

'Sure, sure,' Daisukenojo agreed, finally putting down the menu. 'Now hurry up and decide on what you want, I'm starving.'

Damn, Raiku thought, tugging at a sleeve as she did some laboured mental calculations; that only gave her two days, at most. Two days to get ready, and two days to make sure this little Plot nuisance was well and truly dead before they set off. Neither of her teammates had been seriously injured, they mostly just seemed tired.

She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She could do it. Sure, she couldn't read the Plot very well and since her family would now be preoccupied with the Main Plot, so she would have to deal with it on her own. But she'd spent three years preparing to have some autonomy again, and no … universal causality would break her. Not even her growing fear! She would run towards it, and not away, that was her goal!

… That wasn't true. She had to be realistic. She would at the very least pause significantly before running for the hills! She was a whole new Raiku!

… That wasn't true either. She was a slightly updated Raiku! She was ready.

'For dough-thingies!' she cried, unable to give a genuine battle-cry for obvious reasons and settling on a cause she could at least get behind anyway.

'Oh no! Those come in threes, and we are not starting another fight over those!' Daisukenojo snapped, smacking her with the folded cardboard menu. 'We can get spring rolls or we can get-,'

'We can get your face,' Raiku shot back immediately, before closing her eyes and cursing at the feebleness of her comeback.

'Oh, burn,' Ryuu said snidely, never one to miss a cue. 'Such witticisms.'

'Your face is a … witticism,' Daisukenojo retorted, both he and Raiku turning on their more composed teammate. They were on opposite sides, but those sides were left and right, while Ryuu's was down. In Hell, from whence he had presumably emerged.

'Yeah,' Raiku added in a show of support. '…Take that.' She raised an arm to call the fleeing waitress back. In response, the Plot raised what was possibly an arm in what she felt was an unnecessary mockery, leaking a brief ray of white light before it slid over the table and to nowhere she wanted to think about because goddamnit, of course it wouldn't make things easy for her.

"Pathetic," Yamada chipped in eventually, apparently concluding that their tiny fight was over. She was glad to see the haze of Plot compulsion clearing from his eyes, but the dubious look was barely an improvement. "We're all gonna die."

'So! Now that that's settled, how was the Exam?' Raiku asked, while Daisukenojo apparently sorted out their orders for them. He was getting rather bossy. In an oddly reasonable way, but still. She'd have to keep an eye on that. Ryuu was controlling, but entirely too misanthropic to be leader under Yamada, and she was woefully underqualified. Maybe he'd step up?

'Surprisingly easy,' Ryuu said after a moment's reflection. 'It was just a straight series of fights and tests.'

'Yeah, actually. It was kind of weird. The last few were super elaborate and needlessly complicated,' Daisukenojo added.

Of course they were. It was made up by shinobi; needlessly complicated was their entire thing, Raiku sniggered mentally. But still. It sounded like the Genematrix had made it a bit easier just to make absolutely sure the last batch of their rookie year got through, which was a relief. Especially since the alternative was for it to kill them off, which she would find inconvenient. All the other teams were so Dramatic, it would have been totally unmanageable.

Oh, and she'd sort of gotten attached to them. But she tended to gloss over that part in her head, because feelings were for ladies. Which she absolutely was not. Female, yes, but the finer parts of ladydom had sort of skipped her. Ladyness? Ladyhood?

"They did good," Yamada chipped in reluctantly, to her surprise. "Little bastards."

'Aw! You're proud of us,' Daisukenojo cooed, because he never could leave well enough alone.

Yamada's face immediately darkened. Raiku quickly scrambled to distract everyone. Unfortunately, she'd spent the last portion of the time-skip motivating her teammates through open provocation, and old habits died hard.

'So! You guys are finally my equals, hu-uh?' she asked, cracking her knuckles. 'Well, I still have seniority, so there.'

Ryuu was the first to break the incredulous silence that followed her oddly confrontational statement, because he always was. 'You really don't have any survival instincts, do you?' he marvelled, breaking his chopsticks apart. An action Raiku hadn't previously known could be so threatening, but hey, you learned something new every day!

'So we can get the dough thingies after all, once Raiku's been killed and dumped in a shallow grave,' Daisukenojo informed them, her staunch ally until the end, that asshole.

Raiku creased her eyes at Ryuu cheerfully, rubbing her faintly crackling hands together just to make enough noise for him to hear and be wary of. 'This is gonna be so great. We can finally actually do stuff with what we've been studying for so long!'

'As opposed to all of that nothing we were doing before?' Daisukenojo snorted.

'Doesn't count,' Raiku said with a dismissive wave. 'We weren't a full Chuunin team before! Now things are getting serious!'

This wasn't entirely what she meant, but it was close enough. Genin from her year had actually been getting weirdly advanced missions since early on, probably the Genematrix's way of trying to make them ready for whatever it had up its sleeves for Naruto's young-adulthood. Like it was normal for preteens to be sent into enemy territory with such awful regularity, yeah right. But their missions during the time-skip had felt tamer and even less real in her memories, probably because of the whirlwind speed of it all. Things felt real again, in a way she hadn't realised they didn't before.

It was almost exciting, actually. It wasn't; it was horrifying, but still! So close!

"At least one of you knows that," Yamada grumbled. Raiku blinked, confused, until she realised Ryuu had realised her obliviousness to his evil intentions and directed them at Daisukenojo instead, who was shooting insults at him as he yanked splinters out of his hands.

'We're off to a great start already,' she sighed, resting her chin on her palm. Mostly to hide how honestly she believed it; the two of them behaving normally wasn't Dramatic at all!

She was glad her smile was hidden by her mask; now, if she could just get that Plot that had escaped, they'd be set.

Well, not quite set. She still had to re-familiarise herself with all of the other former Genin, make sure she had enough supplies for the trip, check with her dad, tell Kakashi she was going, buy clothes that weren't fraying at the seams because what was good enough for the time-skip wouldn't last ten minutes outside of it before the Genematrix shredded it in a fit of sartorial pique-

Raiku frowned to herself, smile gone already. So wait, there was actually a lot left to do.

'Hello?' she called, waving to the waitress (still steadfastly ignoring them). 'Hello?'

If she was going to get all of this done in a few short days, she was going to have to build up her strength. Thank god she hadn't spent much money since the time-skip started. She drew breath to speak and squeaked instead when something tugged hard on her leg, almost dragging her under the table.

'Ignore her. She's just insane,' Daisukenojo dismissed, taking the waitress' attention for himself while Raiku grabbed at the table for support.

'What the hell, Ryuu?!' she hissed.

Ryuu rolled his eyes. 'What?'

… Wait.

Raiku ducked down to look under the table and caught a glimpse of a black mass sliding away.

Oh good. It had a sense of humour, too.

She righted herself and glared at Ryuu just to have something equally annoying to focus on, and got an aggressively challenging look in response. Even his eyebrows, his stupidly well-shaped eyebrows, were sharp. He really was going to take some getting used to.

'Tomorrow, we should probably go around getting supplies together,' Daisukenojo suggested. 'That way we all know what everybody's got.'

Raiku blinked. 'That was a surprisingly reasonable suggestion, Daisuke.'

A notion any Gairano could get behind. And that way, if they ran into their peers and got updated on their lives on their own, the Plot would be weakened enough to maybe even disappear on its own.

'Thanks. Your surprise isn't annoying at all,' Daisukenojo replied. 'Now hurry up and order. We've been on the road for a week and after this, I'm gonna pass out at home. No small thanks due to Ryuu's  _tender loving care_.'

Ryuu cracked his knuckles and Raiku buried her face in the menu immediately. No sudden movements. That was the way.


	57. manicures and personal space

_\- you think you're_ -

Raiku shook her head, hard enough that she could practically feel her brain rattling around, and the thin thread of story being picked up by her annoyingly sensitive narrative awareness drifted off. She shot the Plot that was sliding down the street after them a vile glare, but couldn't really do much else. Not for now, anyway, what with the Main Storyline dragging her feet along.

Goddamn Naruto.

Unable to stop herself from obeying years of programming, she leaned back against the narrative tide as much as she could, but this was gonna happen and she knew it. She was going to meet Naruto and have her development noted for both him and the Main Storyline, along with all his other peers, for ease of narrative flow. The easier this went for the Genematrix, the less likely it would be to take notice of her. And then take revenge.

Well, the less likely it would be to try and involve her any further, anyway. Her father said that massive cosmic story engines couldn't be spiteful, but she was pretty sure that was a lie.

To top it all off, it was a beautiful day. The weather was warm, the sun was shining, the breeze was mild and soothing and she could smell… something pleasant. Random pleasant smells didn't just  _happen_. That, more than anything else, made it clear that Naruto was around. That was the universe's way of saying, "Oh, look at what an idyllic scene we have here! Let's establish some hometown atmosphere!"

'Hey, Ryuunosuke!'

Right on cue.

Raiku inhaled and braced herself. A high, female voice. Almost certainly Sa—

'Yamanaka,' Ryuu replied, voice settling into the lower, calmer register he generally adopted when not yelling at her or Daisuke. 'You three were off training?'

Not Sakura after all? Raiku blinked, surprised, then shook it off and braced herself for the second time in as many minutes. Of course not. That would be far too anticlimactic. There had to be some build up. She couldn't afford to let her guard down! She always did that, no matter how focused she tried to be, and that was when Kakashi got her—

The Genematrix. That was when the  _Genematrix_  got her. Raiku stifled the urge to look frantically for Kakashi before he could ambush her; he was back in the Main Plot now, and there would be no more of that. **  
**

Ino was beautiful. It was actually a little dazzling to see her and Ryuu stand next to each other, even if Ryuu was just feigning his pleasant expression. She was slender and pale and just so very beautiful already, elegant in purple and obviously utterly self-assured. Even her smug grin didn't make her less attractive, because she and Ryuu had apparently started some sort of contest that Raiku didn't want to know about. Probably something to do with making people suffer. **  
**

She transferred her gaze elsewhere and Shikamaru nodded at her, clearly not overly fussed about Ino hijacking another group of Chuunin. 'Gairano.'

'Hey, Nara,' Raiku replied, discreetly scanning him. He was slouching, and he looked dour. He was attractive, in a… scowl-y, grim, minimal way, and his hair really suited him like that, and he was maybe taller than her? The extreme slouch made it hard to tell. It may have been the weight of stereotype dragging him down, but he was…

'How are things?' Raiku asked quickly, desperate to stop that train of thought. Shikamaru was not attractive. Well, he was, but he wasn't. To Gairano. Shikamaru's hotness was  _not_  uncomplicated enough in nature to register on the Gairano attractiveness scale because Shikamaru was an important Side Character and she  _would not have it_.

…Goddamn, the studs weren't helping any.

At least they matched Ino's?! That made them… no it didn't, she had to look somewhere else.

Shikamaru hummed noncommittally, a non-answer because he was polite to women, but Raiku didn't really count, so she got to look at Chouji instead.

Of the three, oddly, it was the least significant character that had changed the most. Chouji... Actually looked like a person, rather than a particularly friendly Kabuki stereotype. He in fact looked the oldest, the surplus weight that Akimichi used so effectively having finally settled to fit his frame in an actual, human way, rather than... orbiting it for comic effect. Raiku stared at him, unable to stop herself.  _Well_. At least someone had gotten something good out of the time-skip.

Hold on. Where had that thought come from? Raiku frowned, mulling it over in her head, testing the thought for consistency against her usual internal monologue.

After a moment, she hissed in outrage. This earned her a weird look from Chouji, who was starting to sweat under her bioluminescent scrutiny, but she was used to that, so she could ignore it.  **  
**

The little _bastard._ The Genematrix was trying to make everyone be  _friendly_.

Of course it was. It needed them all to know each other, so there was no time wasted on pesky reminders later on! How many others were just conveniently running into each other across town, catching up and being all buddy-buddy!? How dare that… thing! How dare it just… make them be social against their will?!

Raiku paled. Oh no. That meant she'd have to run into the others as well. Probably all in one day. She could feel herself starting to sweat. She couldn't handle that many Characters in one day. She'd only scraped through the Chuunin Exams because of all the Drama messing with her brain. Well, that and Mura's ruthless interference, but still! She couldn't do it!

She knew what she had to do. She would clearly not be able to get out of it completely, because Main Plot was what it was. But she could still achieve the same thing by sneaking around! As long as she could remain separate from Ryuu and Daisuke, the Genematrix would grudgingly take care of them on their own. No fuss, just her on her own bumping into people on the street and maybe waving. No unnecessary bonding.

Perfect.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. 'You guys stay and catch up! I've gotta go grab some razor wire anyway.'

Ryuu and Daisuke turned to look at her. 'We're doing that together, stupid,' Daisuke informed her bluntly.

'That's the entire point of this little outing,' Ryuu explained helpfully.

 _Don't rise to the bait, Raiku_ , she told herself, keeping her expression mild. 'Yeah, but you guys don't use that and it's only sold at the specialty store! I'll meet up with you later.'

Daisuke shrugged. 'Suit yourself.'

Ryuu watched her for a moment. '…Sure,' he said at last, turning back to Ino.

Raiku managed to walk casually to the end of the street and turn the corner, like everything was totally normal, before breaking into a mad dash towards the other side of town.  **  
**

Operation: Run Like Hell (or Raiku's Life Goals) was officially in effect.

 

 

 

 

 

…It was officially off to a rocky start.

'Yo, Gairano! You need this stuff too?'

Raiku tried to blend in with the nearby display of naginata. While she had the general shape right, she wasn't quite shiny enough and Inuzaka wasn't fooled. **  
**

'Hey! You hear me?' he asked from behind her, the sudden force of his voice almost startling her into cutting her fingers off. The razor wire spool she'd been holding sprang free of its clip and she scrambled to catch it, the loops quickly unravelling around her hands in a flash of silver and… black.

Goddamnit.

'…Hey, Inuzaka,' she said weakly, trying to disentangle herself from the Plot-tainted razor wire without losing something that should remain attached, or electrifying anything too conspicuous. 'What stuff?' At least it gave her an excuse not to look at him, she reflected.

The grin was almost audible. 'I've gotta pick up some special equipment to use with Akamaru, so we swung by.'

"We". Of course.

'Where's your team?' he asked, probably looking around. The guy broadcast his every movement so clearly. Maybe it was part of the whole delinquent aesthetic the Genematrix was going for? The wild guy, that whole shtick.

'They don't need anything from here, so we're going to meet at the more general shinobi place later,' she said, gingerly unwrapping wire from around her pinky, eyes watering from her refusal to blink in case this was the last time she ever saw her hand intact. 'Is it just you?'

It wasn't. He'd already said so.

'Nah. Hinata and Shino are around somewhere.'

'I'm here.'

Raiku tensed, wire digging into her gloved fingers dangerously at the sudden, deep voice coming from her left. Kakashi had spent so long sneaking up on her that she hadn't flailed, which would have left her with a bloody stump instead of a hand, but she took a moment to calm herself before speaking.

'Hey, Shino,' she said, slow and even. 'How are Muta and Atsuko? And Tsumi? And Ai? And…' This was getting out of hand. Literally. If she couldn't count the connections on one hand, family tradition said that was too many. Single Gairano shinobi really had to stop beelining for the Aburame.

Ha!  _Beelining—..._ not the time for hilarious wordplay!

'…and everyone!' she finished, cutting the list short. She risked a sideways glance, but didn't want to chance moving anything but her eyes, in case she'd somehow gotten herself further wrapped up by mistake. Shino looked at her. Maybe. The round, black glasses made it hard to tell. Wow, he'd really covered up. Not that she was one to talk. But they were close in height! Finally, someone she didn't have to look down at!

'Everyone is doing well,' he replied in that startlingly deep voice, hands stuck in the front pocket of his enormous green hoodie. He was possibly, with the hood up, and the glasses on, and the high collar, the only person ever to show the same amount of skin as Raiku.  _God,_  she loved the Aburame. 'How is your family?'

'Oh…' Raiku said slowly, returning her gaze to her hands and tentatively starting to try and slip out again. 'You know. Same old, same old.'

'What the hell's going on around there?' Raiku froze again, at the sudden breath fanning out over her ear, sending shivers down her spine. The mask offered some protection on her neck, but not her ears. Her stupidly vulnerable ears.

'What are you doing?' she hissed, eyes wide and staring blankly forward. She could just make out brown spikes in her peripheral vision, because in true Inuzaka style, Kiba apparently thought personal space was something that happened to other people.

'What? I just wanted to see what was up. What have you done with that? You know it's supposed to come in loops, right?' A tanned hand reached over and pointed helpfully at her trapped digits. Shino leaned closer, turning his attention to her predicament and humming low in thought.

Raiku broke out in a sweat, anxiety making her chest tighten. There were two people within a metre of her who weren't her teammates or her family. This had never happened before. This wasn't something she was used to. This was not okay.  _This was not okay_.

'…Gairano?'

Oh god. There were three now.

Raiku made a high, small sound in response, too tense to actually speak.

'Hey Hinata. Take a look at this, will ya? I'm no good at knots.'

'Raiku? Are you… okay?'

Raiku managed to turn her head enough to see Hinata, the icing on this cake of… personal space violation. The Hyuuga heiress was blushing slightly, like always, but maintaining eye contact, which was new. Her hair was long. It suited her that way. Hyuuga seemed to have a thing for it. Well, that and the round, delicate faces that seemed out of a different era entirely, at least for the women.

Raiku refused to dwell on the male faces. Any of them.

But still, that was another three out of the way. If she could just buy the wire and then—

'She's fine.'

Raiku yelped as long fingers reached into the mess of wire, a fine layer of chakra wrapping around the mass of metal before it could flay her, dragged abruptly off.

Daisukenojo grimaced at the wire tangled around his hand, safely layered in chakra. 'There. Easy.'

Raiku stared at him, hands shaking. 'You… You could have ripped my fingers off!'

'You're fine. She's fine,' he added to Hinata in particular, for seemingly no reason. Except for the fact that she was Hinata and that was a girl's name.

And also she was a lot more obviously female now,  _god_. Raiku stared… No hoodie was hiding those. Had she gotten Raiku's delivery as well as her own? How was that fair?

Wait. Hinata wasn't looking at her anymore. Wait. Why was she so red?

'Like the view, Gairano?' Kiba snickered, drawing away from her shoulder.

'What?' Raiku asked, honestly puzzled, before dragging her eyes up from Hinata's sudden developments to look at Kiba. He was shaggier, the markings on his face just accentuating cheekbones he apparently had now, his eyes a little more wolf-like, because of course. But he'd said something. 'What—oh god!' she yelped, covering her eyes with her hands. 'I swear, I wasn't—no! I mean, not  _no_ , but not  _yes_ , I wasn't even-,'

Daisukenojo was going red too. He flapped his hands at her, looking a square inch from strangling her. 'Holy shit, shut up! You're making everything worse!'

'I know but I can't stop!' Raiku wailed.

'It… It's not a big deal,' Hinata tried, but the mortified whisper was more traumatic than even Daisukenojo's second-hand embarrassment.

'We're leaving,' Ryuu cut in, and Raiku dropped her hands from her eyes just in time to be yanked backwards by the shirt. 'We're leaving right now. No one will ever speak of this again.'

'What are you both even doing here!?' This hadn't been the plan! None of this had been the plan! She was not supposed to be with her teammates! Raiku choked, the neck of her shirt pulled up to cut off her oxygen from the force of Ryuu's determined drag, arms windmilling at her sides to try and keep her balance.

'Saving us all some embarrassment. Move!'

Raiku's strangled noises drew some attention from the other shop-goers, but not nearly as much as Kiba's raucous laughter, accompanying them all the way to the exit.

 

 

 

 

 

_\- from me can't touch-_

'What were you thinking?!' Daisukenojo demanded, hands on hips and looking a lot like his mother. Only shorter. 'This is why we can never go anywhere!'

'You sound like a nagging wife,' Ryuu said, finally released Raiku from her shirt-prison. Raiku gasped, hand coming up to massage her probably bruised neck.

'Why?' she rasped, pulling at her mask a little to help the air get in. 'Why not… grab my arm? Instead of choking me?!'

'It was an emergency, let it go.'

'Great,' Daisukenojo sighed, gesturing at her. 'She probably ended up with a bruised windpipe and now we'll have to get her checked out.'

'No!' Raiku gasped. 'I'm fine! I'm totally fine!' Anywhere they could get medical attention would be a hotbed of shinobi Drama, just guaranteed to get them noticed by another team.

'Is everything alright over here? We heard yelling. And… choking.'

Not Daisukenojo. Not Ryuu. Oh god this was definitely it—Raiku ducked and covered her head with her arms.

'Hey, Tenten!' Daisukenojo's voice had gone up almost an octave. Not exactly hunk material, but nerves were nerves and he couldn't really help it. It wasn't like he had a real shot with Tenten anyway; Daisukenojo wasn't even a recurring character in the Main Plot, and that left Tenten way out of his reach.

Still, she didn't want to open her eyes. This was way too fast. Three teams in such quick succession was killing her. Surely no one thought this was normal?! What were the odds?! The rookie teams would be out as exactly that- groups of three, designed for easy absorption and reintroduction. Which meant Lee and—

Daisukenojo seemed to remember that people outside of the lovely brunette he was crushing on existed. He coughed to try to cover his lapse. '… Lee. Hyuuga,' he added in a gruffer voice.

Neji.

Raiku sighed to herself quietly, then straightened, keeping her arms over her head so that she could pretend she had just been stretching, lengthening out until she released them back to her sides again. 'Oh, hi!' she said, turning and smiling with her eyes as best she could. '…Fancy seeing you here!' Fancy nothing; this was clearly the day everyone had to buddy up to each other.  **  
**

Rock Lee was the first person she saw, mostly because he was the first person everyone saw when Naruto wasn't around. He was just so… _conspicuous_. He was so conspicuous that he was actually almost inconspicuous, a phenomenon that the Gairano had studied eagerly, only to ultimately fail to replicate it after a few embarrassing attempts. He looked almost exactly the same, maybe with a little less roundness to his face? Raiku puzzled over what was different for a few seconds, then put her finger on it. Flak vest. He was wearing a flak vest, he was a little taller and his face had lost the puppy fat. Revolutionary stuff.

Poor Rock Lee. He really had no chance with a Main Character like Sakura. He'd changed about as much as Raiku, who wasn't a Character at all.

Actually, she thought sadly, he'd changed exactly the same amount. Even after all the trauma she'd been through, she was the female equivalent of Rock Lee. When she had some time to think about that later, she would really do her best not to Angst.  **  
**

Unaware of her growing despair, Lee waved. 'Daisukenojo! Raiku! Ryuu!'

'Team Yamada,' Neji greeted in a rather more concise fashion, hands tucked into long white sleeves.

Neji. Something about Neji always made Raiku feel awkward, even more gangly than she actually was. It was probably just by contrast to his natural elegance; much of her eccentricity could be attributed to defensive Gairano behaviors, but there was no denying that her idiosyncrasies were only partially artificial. She tucked her hands into her pockets after she noticed that they'd been hovering awkwardly for a few seconds, showing how unsure she was of what to do. She tried to look at him. In her defense, she really did. But something about it was hard, she just couldn't…

Raiku squinted, feeling uneasily like Neji was blurring at the edges, the thin threads of Plot not blending into him like they should have been. It was as if he were one of those magic eye pictures she'd looked at instead of doing chakra exercises, because Iruka only had so much patience. Her eyes just… kept catching on Plot that she should have been able to ignore, like it was shifting in place. Maybe it wasn't sure what to do with him yet, since he had the strongest connection to Naruto in his team? Either way, the overlay of Plot and person, usually so easy to differentiate, was making her eyes water.

She shook her head and looked at the sky, because her head was starting to hurt. He was wearing white, and long sleeves? He didn't look angry, maybe? All her observations were going to end in question marks, so she decided to just assume he was insanely good-looking and dignified to save herself a migraine.

'It's been a long time, you three,' Tenten greeted with a smile. 'Are you guys on your way to training?'

Daisuke shook his head. 'Restocking for a mission. You?'

This conversation was about to go nowhere at a slow crawl, so Raiku tuned them out and set about continuing to catch up on her peers.

Luckily, she could safely ignore Neji, as he wasn't focused on her in particular. As far as she could make out, he was just regarding the three of them with a mild expression; it was actually slightly reminiscent of her father's, and the thought made her shudder. Moving on from  _that_  in a hurry…

Tenten was still very pretty, but like Rock Lee, her changes were not profound. Height. Slight change to overall body shape. White shirt and less terrifyingly bright pants, rather than the pink, which had been almost offensively girly anyway and, frankly, a bit lazy of the Genematrix to start with. She wore her hair the same, but walked with more confidence. That was the main thing everyone seemed to have in common, her own teammates included.

Wait, no. Focusing. There was something exotic in the almond shape of Tenten's eyes, probably just to distinguish her from the other brunette rookies, and she really had become so lovely, even in just a few short years. Maturity suited her, Raiku decided with a quiet huff of what was absolutely not jealousy. But she'd already used her own appearance to gauge the degree of change in Neji and Lee, so she forced herself not to compare herself to Tenten. Not because it would damage her self-esteem. Because that would be silly.

Raiku wondered idly if she too seemed more confident, then dismissed it out of hand as utterly ridiculous. She couldn't take this anymore. She had no idea how to do this. Character descriptions were boring after two minutes and doing it inside her head was going to make her all introspective and… critical. Raiku didn't  _have_  self esteem! It wasn't even  _low_ , it just wasn't a thing, because her sense of self was fluid at best and no attractive peer was going to ruin that when she had worked so hard to make it that way!

'Well!' she said brightly, cutting off whatever Ryuu had been saying and knowing she'd pay for it later. 'I guess I'll be off then!'

Lee had apparently been saying something, but she had no time for friendship or basic human consideration! Her emotional stability was at risk, and since Raiku couldn't chance turning into a real teenage girl, she had mere minutes to escape, and then she just had to continue escaping for… three more years. She just had to get out as soon as—

'Something wrong, Gairano?'

Goddamn  _Neji_. If she had a hard time looking at him, how was it fair that he could look at her nervous fidgeting?!

Raiku searched frantically for a solution. This had to end. 'Nope! No, I just… have stuff to buy, for the mission!'

'No shit. That's what we're out doing. Together,' Ryuu said, looking suspicious in a very inconvenient way, which was the only way Ryuu knew how to do things. Raiku went red, because of course she did, it was like she was allergic to subterfuge.

But wait, that could be helpful! 'Stuff. Lady stuff. That I… don't want to buy with you,' she hedged, trying to look embarrassed and actually succeeding, probably because she was. It was sort of refreshing to just express as obviously as possible, instead of deliberately.

Lee flushed and looked up at the sky. Who even knew what Neji was doing. Luckily, Daisuke had somehow managed to wrangle Tenten into a conversation about… something that Raiku didn't care about, so at least those were two fewer witnesses to her mortifying escape.

'You don't need "lady stuff". You're not a lady. We went over this while Ichitaka was still alive,' Ryuu retorted.

Raiku gaped. 'E… Excuse me! It has been years since then, and also, that's a bit… I don't know, flippant, given you're talking about someone who,' had likely been murdered by Raiku, '…died on a mission with us!'

Ryuu narrowed his eyes. Always a bad sign. 'Don't change the subject, this isn't about me.'

'Oho, that's a change,' she scoffed, or tried to. It came out a little more fearful than she intended, but she took it in stride. Things usually did. 'I'm leaving! You're being creepy and asking super-personal questions! I don't have to stand for this interrogation!' She threw her arms up, feeling it was as exasperated a gesture as she could make without falling over.

Ryuu hadn't looked away. His expression hadn't changed. He was suspicious. There was only one thing to do.

'Or we could go together. Maybe afterwards we could visit your  _mother_ ,' Raiku offered, stressing the word meaningfully. 'She'd think it was so cute!'

Ryuu's mother was lovely and Raiku was actually interested in spending a lot more time with her, but the woman's obvious desire for the gangly Gairano and Ryuu to get together was unsettling.

And not just to Raiku.

Ryuu blanched. 'Get out of here.'

Raiku wasted no time complying. 'Well! It was good seeing you, Team, uh, Gai! And you guys, I'll… meet up with later! Tomorrow, maybe!'

Daisukenojo wasn't looking at her, and Ryuu was looking everywhere but at her, so Raiku cut her losses and ran.

 

 

 

 

 

_\- safe from you think-_

Raiku rubbed the bridge of her nose, dragging her thoughts back into some semblance of order. She had to stay focused. She had to stay sharp. She had to really think about this, or it would all be a disaster.

'Can I help you with anything—'

'Can't you see I'm on a mission?!' Raiku demanded hysterically, almost startling the store assistant out of her skin. 'These aren't going to agonize over themselves!'

The girl, who couldn't have been more than Raiku's age, immediately fled the feminine hygiene section.

Raiku let herself fall forward until her head hit the metal shelf, closing her eyes and taking a few deep breaths. She could do this. Every month since this whole… oh god,  _period_  thing, had started, she'd find a nondescript bag outside her door, with a small variety of supplies, which she was pretty sure her father was getting her aunts to get for her. Kunoichi whose families didn't object were put on birth control that regulated this sort of thing, or at least made it as infrequent as it could be, as soon as they were deemed medically fit for it, so Raiku at least had a stockpile. But it wasn't the sort of thing she could take on missions, so maybe there was a kunoichi section? It sounded ridiculous, but she should play it safe, maybe?

She was just confused beyond understanding at this point. All the packages were different primary colors, and had confusing combinations of words on them. "Safe", "protection" and "hypoallergenic" she understood, but what were "invisible", "party" and "definitely not containing asbestos*" doing there?! That last one was reassuring, unless she thought about it hard, but the asterisk was a little—

'Holy-! She was serious! She's actually here!' Daisukenojo announced from the far side of the aisle, looking honestly surprised. Raiku jerked back away from the shelf, eyes widening with shock.

'You followed me here!?'

'Well,' Ryuu said slowly, ignoring her accusation and taking in the selection with a carefully blank expression. Under the harsh fluorescents, he looked half-dead. Raiku took a petty pleasure from it. 'Fuck me. She was telling the truth.'

Raiku gasped. Because of the profanity. Not because of anything else. It had been a weird day for everybody and this was not about her confused, Drama-influenced brain. 'You can't say that! That's… that is  _so_  rude, I'm telling Yamada!'

Ryuu clicked his tongue 'Cool.' He wasn't even bothering to look at her. Like Raiku, he seemed to feel that looking as harmless as possible would stop him from provoking the army of feminine products arranged before them. 'And then you can tell him where we were when I said it.'

Damn. He had her there.

'Stupid Ryuu,' she hissed, unable to even put sanitary pads and Yamada in the same thought without hurting herself.

'So… are you gonna buy something, or just lean against it looking sad?' Daisukenojo asked, sauntering over to stand on her other side. He looked totally comfortable. Probably because of all his… sisters…

'Daisuke! You can help me!' Raiku grabbed his arm. Daisukenojo instinctively tried to worm away, but Raiku had long fingers, a strong grip and the ability to electrocute him, so it wasn't going to happen. 'Are there kunoichi-specific ones?'

Daisukenojo looked horrified. 'Oh, hell no! I am not having this conversation with you!'

'Ryuu doesn't have any sisters, and some of yours are teenagers now! Plus, plus! Your mother is super scary and probably made you buy her some!'

Ryuu appeared to be browsing anyway, now a few feet away. This had the added bonus of making it look like he didn't know them, which was probably why. He had no other reason to be browsing in this section, so that had to be it.

'I don't—this is not my job! Shouldn't your-,' Daisukenojo suddenly cut himself off, dropping his head to stare at the floor fixedly.

Raiku blinked. 'Shouldn't… my…'

He cleared his throat, keeping his eyes averted.

Her what? What should have—

Ah.

Well, it had to be useful at least once in her life. 'My mother is dead, Daisuke!' Raiku reminded him, deliberately loud. He flinched, either from horror or embarrassment. People were turning to stare at the apparently motherless girl. Females were, which was the important thing with Daisukenojo. 'She died, and left me all alone in the scariest part of the supermarket, and now you, my favorite teammate, won't even help me with this one little thing!' She paused. 'Because she's  _dead_ ,' she emphasized again for good measure. She'd had a long time to come to terms with it. Daisukenojo stood no chance.

'Hey.' Ryuu's complaint drifted over from the far side of the aisle.

'You don't get to be everyone's favorite! Or anyone's! Daisuke, please?' Raiku whined, trying to make herself look as pathetic as possible. Sure, it was low. Daisukenojo had a very strong connection to his own mother. But they emotionally blackmailed her all the time, and she never got to do it back, and also it was entirely true anyway. Fair was fair!

Daisukenojo sighed. 'Fine. I'll ask my mother. Later today!' he added, when Raiku let out a little cheer. 'Not now! Now I want to leave and not think about this, and…' he made an awkward gesture that seemed to be at both her and everything in front of her, 'all that!'

Raiku fist-pumped. 'Yesss!'

Daisukenojo started shoving her towards the exit. 'Yes, yes, I'm an amazing guy, now move!'

* * *

_\- because I there is no-_

It was only once the three had once again ended up on the main street, when she had to shove meandering Plot out of her mind, that she realized she'd been had.

'Oh, screw you,' she hissed, just about ready to drown in narrative… smugness.

Daisukenojo looked offended, then looked around her to Ryuu and relaxed. He'd probably assumed she meant Ryuu. Always a safe assumption.

She stifled a sigh. Tricked again. She really was not very good at this. Still, it had gone pretty well so far, that horrifying moment in the specialty store aside. Aside forever, she had decided, because it wasn't something she ever wanted to think about again. It was easier said than done, though, running through her brain over and over like it always had on the rare occasions in the past when she'd come close like that. It would take a while to shake loose, she knew, because it always stuck with her; the way other people ran cold, cooling the charged air around her so quickly.

_\- because you think I-_

Raiku ground her teeth together, the dull ache forcing the Plot snippets out of her mind. She didn't know where that tiny, but oddly audacious, Plot was, but it was really getting on her nerves. Dealing with that little asshole and the Main Story was giving her a headache. Oh god. The Genematrix was probably using it to distract her.

When the hell had it gotten so sneaky?

No, she could ask her dad about that later. She just had to get through the day. Okay. Okay. They were together again. That meant they had another team to go. They'd met Teams Asuma, Kurenai and Gai, which left—

Daisukenojo grabbed her shoulder abruptly, cursing. 'Ryuu! Hurry!'

Raiku jerked back and looked down at him, only for Ryuu to grab the other shoulder. 'What the hell are you-' she broke off into a squawk, suddenly being shoved out of the main street and into a narrow pathway between houses, almost falling when they released her just as quickly.

'When the hell did he get back?!' Daisukenojo demanded in what he probably thought was a whisper, peering around the mouth of the alley at something she hadn't seen in the first place.

'You think I keep track of this stuff?' Ryuu replied, distinctly snippy, oddly tense.

'Well since you keep track of everything, you paranoid weirdo? Yes!'

'What are we keeping track of?!' Raiku exclaimed, only for Ryuuu to clap a hand over her masked mouth.

'You want him to find us?!'

Raiku made a muffled sound of questioning, and Ryuu yanked his hand back with a hiss. 'She shocked me!'

'Who cares?!'

'Who are we hiding from?!'

'Uzumaki!' the two of them chorused, before they both ducked out of sight and hid next to her along the wall.

Raiku stared, trapped between her two teammates.

…Wait, why were  _they_  avoiding Naruto?

_\- you think I can't safe-_

Raiku tapped her fingers against her thigh, little bursts of energy sparking at the contact beneath the fabric of her pants, the stimulation effectively interrupting the tiny Plot's interruptions. The last thing she needed when she was trying to stay alert for Naruto Plot was some hack, side-story villain monologuing in her head.

That's it. She was going to have to ask.

'Why… are we hiding?' she asked, shuffling around Daisuke so she could peer out from around the wall to sneak a quick look at Naruto while his back was turned. He seemed taller. Stupid Raiku, that was obvious. Less orange? More black was involved. It made his hair seem super bright. After a few seconds of examination, she ducked back into the alley. 'Wait, do you not like Naruto?'

'It's not that we don't  _like_  him,' Daisukenojo said, very pointedly looking at the sky rather than at her.

'Everybody likes him,' Ryuu said rather more directly and with a great deal more distaste. 'Everyone who has met Uzumaki ends up liking him somehow, even when they hated him beforehand, and I refuse to make another friend.'

Raiku squinted at him. There was something wrong with that sentence. She had a feeling it was, as always, Ryuu's priorities. '…Uzumaki was pretty much universally avoided right up until we graduated,' she pointed out, every word of her counter-argument feeling like she was pulling teeth, because  _Naruto_. But also because the stupid bastards had gone and done something clever. They weren't supposed to notice that! They weren't supposed to take note of Naruto's odd magnetism, and they especially weren't supposed to avoid him because of it!

'Yep. And now he has a bajillion friends and I have enough trouble with just you two,' Daisukenojo pointed out.

'But. He's… already seen us,' Raiku protested weakly. 'What are we supposed to do? Admit we're avoiding him?'

The two boys exchanged glances. 'You're right. One of us will have to stay and make excuses for the other two,' Ryuu said after a moment. Daisukenojo seemed to be doing something complicated with his eyebrows, but Ryuu obviously disagreed with whatever curiously elaborate message he was receiving. He frowned. 'If you think for one second that I'm sticking around here to learn about the power of friendship, Hatori, you're as stupid as you are malformed.'

Daisukenojo shrugged. 'Well, then we only have one option, don't we?'

The two of them turned to look at her simultaneously, and Raiku flinched more from reaction to the cliché than to their imminent betrayal.

 

 

 

 

 

_\- there is no you think you're-_

She couldn't blame them for staring. Not really. If someone had rolled onto the street to land at her feet, she'd probably stare too. Still, the impact had jolted her back to herself, so there was a plus.

'Hey?' Naruto more asked than said.

'Oh. Heeeey, Uzumaki,' Raiku said slowly, eyes darting from side to side to avoid focusing on him. No use; her back-up had fled like the wretched cowards they were. Probably retreated to the perfect distance to watch her suffering from.  **  
**

Naruto beamed at her. In a very literal fashion. The sheer force of his cheer was like a blinding ray of light. Raiku fought the urge to squint. 'Raiku! Long time no see!' He held out a hand and she forced herself to take it, dusting herself off the second he let go.

She laughed awkwardly, rubbing the back of her neck and refusing to think about who she'd picked that up from. Time to interact with Naruto in a normal way, like his narrative sway wasn't acting like a black hole in the back of her mind, sucking in all of her concentration. She could do it. All she had to do was get through this, and the Genematrix would drag Daisukenojo and Ryuu into his path later, in some other weird way. Just be normal. Say something  _normal_. 'Yeah, it has been! And definitely not on purpose, because that…' Damnit, Raiku, you had one job, you had  _one job_ , backtrack,  _backtrack,_  'wouldn't be a thing, even! How are you!? I'm good,' stop talking like a letter, you don't  _write_  letters anymore—

'Good! Why are you all twitch-,' Naruto's face was abruptly shoved out of Raiku's vision. Not that she'd been looking directly at it, not yet emotionally ready for that ordeal.

'Hey Raiku,' Sakura said, rolling her eyes. 'Ignore him, you're not twitchy.'

Raiku winced. 'Oh, I am a bit. It's good to see you guys again! Does this mean you're back in Konoha for good now, Uzumaki?'

It was annoying, having to go through the motions. Of course he was. Of course their team was back together, of course things were moving on now. But these things had to play out, no matter how frustrating it was to ask questions she already knew the answer to. Still, it would be much worse for her dad, who knew far more, who had to interact with so many more people on a daily basis. So she could put up with it, just for a day.

Oh, crap. He was answering.

'Yeah! Sakura and I are working together again!' he said with that radiant smile, slinging an arm around Sakura's shoulders, even as Sakura crossed her arms and pretended to be annoyed by him. The effect was ruined by the smile trying to work its way across her face.

Her… lovely face.

Goddamn, Raiku, not  _again_. Maybe she  _was_  going to like girls. Raiku suppressed a sigh and squared her shoulders. She could do it. She could… not rank people based on attractiveness. Sakura was a Main Character. She was always going to end up on the extreme end of the lovely spectrum, and she was certainly on her way there. Her hair was longer, her clothes suited her more, she seemed more comfortable in her skin, and…

She was also much shorter than Raiku.

'That must be good! After so long!' Even as she automatically made small-talk, Raiku tried to keep the mournful look off her face. She was never going be a normal girl. If she'd been short and pretty, no one would even notice she existed. It would have been perfect. But she was tall and had to dress all weird and her face looked like god only knew, so she stuck out like a sore thumb. That had leprosy. And a fancy manicure.

Still, it could have been worse. Sakura may have been short, but she was also a Main Character, so Raiku could only envy her so much.

She bit the bullet and looked at Naruto, at long last.

It was, as always, like looking into the sun. He radiated goodness, and significance. It was impossible for any Gairano, let alone one as terrible as Raiku, to really focus on him without a tension headache spreading through them. His haircut was the same, the actual hair still that impossibly bright blond, his eyes still almost as blue as hers. But his features were more defined, maybe because he was wearing black, or maybe because he was just growing into his Protagonist good looks at his own pace. He was around her height, too, because heaven forbid the main male lead be dwarfed by a nobody, and overall… it was surprisingly painless.

Well. For Naruto. But still, he'd taken in her appearance too, so at last! Raiku opened her mouth, ready to make her excuses to leave, when it happened. The universe finally threw her a bone. Maybe her father hadn't been lying after all. It finally went her way.

'What the hell?!'

In the form of her teammates, being chased into view by a flock of homicidal magpies, dozens of wings enmeshed firmly in a net of Main Plot.

'What did you do to these goddamn birds, you son of a bitch!?' Daisukenojo shouted, covering his head with his arms and running towards Raiku and, more importantly narrative-wise, Naruto.

'Me?! What about you, they're probably attracted to your clownishly bright hair, idiot!' Ryuu snarled, successfully batting away one crazed, feathery harbinger of doom, sending it almost directly into Raiku's face.

Raiku screamed. She wasn't proud, but she did. She was also not proud of how her shinobi training flew out the window, leaving her flailing at the air to keep the bird away from her.

'Get it off!'

'Save yourself!'

'There's more! They're coming back around!'

Oh god. The Genematrix had overdone it. It had probably noticed she was avoiding it and put some extra  _oomph_  into it and now they were all going to die by over-excited flying rats because she couldn't _keep her shit on lockdown._

Like  _hell_  it couldn't be spiteful!

'What the hell is going on?!'

'My eyes!'

'It was all a lie! I knew my dad was lying!' Raiku screeched, sprinting in the other direction and away from the whirlwind of beaks and narrative, but more importantly… away from Naruto and Sakura.

It wasn't a pretty out, but she'd take it. Besides, Raiku decided, fending off another feathery Plot-bomb; she'd been in a group of three in Naruto's presence. That surely had to count?

Right?

 

 

 

 

 

Right. She'd done the right thing. The only Gairano thing to do! She was right and correct and she'd gotten off to a good start with this new chapter of their lives.

Well, that was certainly what she told herself when she was walking home. It was such a weight off her mind, knowing that the day was finally over. The sun had even finally gotten narrative permission to set, casting Konoha in orange light and creating an appropriately "end of a milestone" ambience.

Speaking of which… she still had one last thing to do.

God, she wanted to groan and bitch and throw her lanky limbs around in an appropriately teen fashion, because she  _hated_ homework. Not for any real reason, since she almost never had any; just because she was a teenager and some things transcend physical realities. But still… she had to do it.

Raiku gritted her teeth and pushed past the layers of Drama and… Character magnetism, dragging the day into the safe, Genematrix-neutral section of the brain that all Gairano maintained so vigilantly.

What she'd learnt. What she'd learnt…

She banged her forehead against the nearby fence, the shock appropriately dulled by her forehead protector, but enough to focus her a little. She had to get it all organized and tied off; no loose ends this time!

So! She'd learnt a lot that day. She'd learned that everyone except her and Rock Lee was going to be good-looking, and the Genematrix was something she'd have to get used to.

…Again.

God, she really was so out of practice. Really, magpies? Who could have predicted those? Raiku huffed, shaking her head hard enough to ruffle her own hair, just to feel like some air was moving in the heat. Now that Naruto had presumably done what he was supposed to, the warm weather had returned and it was like walking through soup. For all that the day was mostly over, well into late afternoon, it seemed to be making up for lost time.

At least she was done for the day.

_-you because think you -  
_

The loose end she'd forgotten about wiggled in her peripheral vision, sliding along the road in the pale light of early evening, taunting her.

That little  _bastard_  had been mocking her all day, distracting her, just because it knew it was safe! But now? Now she was alone. Now she could actually do something about it.

Raiku, after looking around to make sure no one important could see her, made a quick lunge for the Plot, hand slapping down hard. It ducked backwards just in time and she hissed, skin of her palm stinging from the impact, and surged forward again. Her fingers grazed it on the way down and

_You think you're safe,_

a rush of sensation, pouring down her spine like icy water. Raiku gasped and shuddered, clutching at her chest to reassure herself that her heart wasn't trying to squirm free of her body, waiting for the flashes of story to settle into nothing again.

_because I can't touch you._

Goddamn Naruto. Waste of a perfectly beautiful day with Plot and, and atmosphere. She was choosing to ignore that the day had been caused for that atmosphere, because she was exhausted and facts were for the weak. Raiku huffed, frustrated when she saw that the Plot had successfully escaped, and clambered to her feet. She brushed herself off and tried to shrug it off; no minor-league villain spouting nonsense was going to bother her when she had an actual mission to prepare for. So it was wilier than usual, no big deal. So now that Naruto had levelled up, the Genematrix had stepped up its game too. At least its ploys were obvious. Still, she'd have to tell her dad.

She pushed it out of her mind; the feeling, like the imprint of teeth on skin, and the words, so cliché but sticking so strangely firm.

_There is no safe from me._


	58. use your brain and other lost causes

It wasn't that Raiku was  _looking forward_  to the mission.

_…Per se._

That would have been ridiculous, after all. Missions were rife with Drama, and she was in the worst possible age bracket for that anyway. Plus, since she was (at this stage) flying under the Plot radar, there was the very real risk that she could be killed. Being a shinobi was dangerous. Genematrix aside, it would have been ridiculous.

It was more that… okay, so she  _was_  sort of looking forward to it.

Raiku snickered to herself, barely registering the unsettled looks Daisukenojo was throwing her way. She was no less cowardly than she had been, but she'd been dealing with  _Kakashi_. For  _years_. Any enemy that was scarier than him was not one that she would survive anyway, so this mission actually had the potential to be  _reasonably painless_. Well. Maybe not that far, but still! Maybe not as specifically designed to torture her, so  _comparatively_  painless-

She jerked up and looked around quickly, making sure no Narrative threads had caught her thinking that. After a moment, she relaxed. All clear. Still, she couldn't do that again. That had been risky.

'Why are you acting like you're on drugs?' Ryuu grabbed her by her covered chin and forced her to look at him, bright yellow eyes scanning her suspiciously.

When this continued past the point where she usually cracked under scrutiny, Raiku cottoned on to his actual motives **.**  'Are you checking my pupils?!' Well, that was what she had meant to say. Mask or not, Ryuu was still perilously close to skin and still perilously Ryuu-like, so her attempt to avoid moving her jaw much made it come out as a string of incredulous noises.

Ryuu made a sound low in his throat, eyelashes terrifyingly perfect at this range. After a few more seconds he apparently deemed her strange, but sober, and let her go.

'…Where would I even get drugs?' Raiku managed, a little slow on the uptake with all the added stimuli. Yamada was the one with weird drug connections, if her stash of soldier pills was any indication! And given how very, very strictly controlled they were, serious objections should have been raised to her jealously guarded little stockpile, and not so much as a word from Tsunade!

"Alright, you'd better be ready!"

Yamada's booming voice startled her out of it and also a few steps away. He cracked his knuckles as he took in their various states of readiness. "The last report of these little shits said they were still in Fire, and somewhere to the South, South-West of us. There are a few civilian towns nearby, but nothing important enough for us to stake them out, get me? We're gonna operate out of one of the quieter ones, and stay in contact with our patrols that way if this drags on."

Raiku nodded, taking this all in. So they'd be checking out areas to the edge of the patrol routes of Konoha, probably with larger populations or concentrations of wealth, because people were usually predictable at heart.

Geography was never her strong suit, but luckily, Daisukenojo had always been good at it. 'South, South-West? Wait, won't that take us near Land of Rivers?' he pointed out, adjusting one of the straps on his pack. He was carrying Raiku's tiny bedroll as well, since they usually just traded between the three of them to avoid unpacking after a shift on watch and he didn't trust her not to snap like a twig under too much weight anyway. Direct quote.

Yamada nodded. "Should take us just around the border. Tani shouldn't be a problem, not with their patrol range."

'Didn't we all almost die horribly a few years back because we didn't think we could trust them?'

Raiku nodded emphatically in agreement with Daisukenojo, the memory of her own trauma all too vivid.

"Those were different times for Konoha, get me? We won't be anywhere near them and we know we're not on bad terms with them right now anyway." Yamada folded his arms across his chest. "That's not the point. Get walking. I'll brief you before we really get running, get me?"

Raiku turned to look at Konoha's main gate again, steadfastly ignoring the two extremely persistent and extremely annoying jounin who were waving at her mockingly from the left sentry tower. Who needed bandages over their nose for three whole years?! Were they  _decorative_ , how would that even work?!

…Ignoring them was impossible. One of them was waggling his eyebrows. She turned away with a huff, totally not disappointed by not being able to take a properly affectionate look at her home village. Teenage girls weren't that sentimental, nope. Stupid… Izutetsu. They didn't deserve separate names!  _That_  was their name now!

The three of them fell into step beside Yamada, and she found herself glad that she was officially the agile teammate. It was warm and only going to get warmer, and if she'd had to carry a full pack, she probably would have been melting already. Her loyal team would then, naturally, leave her body-puddle for the crows. Her load had been stripped to the bare essentials; her heavier items either handed over to Daisukenojo or left behind entirely, specifically to allow her maximum mobility and speed. Even with that, she was uncomfortably warm and a bit sweaty. Not bad to start off with, though!

"Alright!" After about a kilometer, when the various twists in the road had put some forest between them and Konoha, Yamada officially kicked off the mission with the briefing. "So. Our best info puts them as non-shinobi, but some pretty hardened criminals anyway. Group of a dozen, maybe two dozen. They wait for some disaster to trigger, which they somehow know about, then hit small travelling groups, hard."

'… This really seems like an issue for the local forces, doesn't it? If the criminals aren't shinobi?' Raiku said. Dealing with a couple dozen civilians was doable. Unfortunate, but that was actually something she could feasibly do on her own. Bam! Extra crispy.

…Maybe she should have been less cavalier about civilian lives. In all fairness, they  _were_  criminals. That they were being sent out specifically to kill.

"Good point! Only the small groups they're targeting are shinobi. That's where the weird part comes in, get me? It's not just landslides or anything, stuff that people can set up on their own. Freak lightning strikes, sudden illnesses and once, one of the team members was screwing both of their teammates and they both found out, completely on their own, and let their guard down to argue. Only of them one lived to tell about it. Weird, weird shit. That's why we're coming, get me?" Yamada grimaced, shifting his pack to rest a little more comfortably on his back.

'So they want us to interrogate them,' Ryuu concluded. 'To see how they're doing this and make sure they're acting alone. Then kill them.'

'What have they even been stealing? Someone who robbed us, right now, would make about ten dollars in stolen pots,' Daisukenojo pointed out.

'Hey! I have at least a week's pay worth of metal on my person,' Raiku protested, conveniently forgetting the matter of her illicit drugs. 'And god only knows what Ryuu's carrying. Besides grudges.' Ha! Hilarious  _and_  true; she was on a roll.

"Shut up! They're not robbing them. They're just killing them. In and out, murder, get me?"

Raiku tilted her head to the side thoughtfully. 'That seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to kill tiny groups of shinobi. And you told us in the restaurant that they were stealing!'

"I lied, to make sure you drama queens wouldn't get hysterical, get me?" Yamada said, utterly unrepentant. "Plus, like hell I'd say some of ours, even low-level guys, were getting murdered by civilians, in a room full of civilians! Use your damn head!"

'Still!' Raiku gestured wildly. 'Why even bother?! Stealing at least made sense!'

'It won't be for fun, idiot,' Ryuu said, rolling his eyes. 'Chances are they have a grudge against Konoha, or are trying to lure out a more important group for capture and torture.'

'Like us?' Daisukenojo said sarcastically. 'Yeah. Real effective.'

'Wait, torture? Did you say torture? Can we go back to the torture, because I—'

"They could also be trying out whatever weird system they've got, to make sure it'd work for something bigger," Yamada said, cutting Raiku's worried muttering off short. "Any of those is not on, get me?"

'Wait. Torture. I'm still stuck on the whole "torture" thing.'

Yamada was totally uninterested in her totally valid concerns. "Speedy! You'll be with Sullen, scouting ahead. Shorty and I will bring up the rear."

'I'm not short anymore!' Daisukenojo exclaimed. He may have calmed down a lot over the last few years, but there were certain hot-button issues remaining. 'Come the hell on!'

Yamada grinned. "You're the shortest here."

Daisukenojo growled and Raiku lengthened her stride, taking her ahead of the group and the increasingly likely confrontation. 'Well! Time for Ryuu and me to go ahead!'

She paused.

She turned back. 'As soon as I find out where we're going!'

Yamada took a moment to roll his eyes heavenwards, putting a pause on Daisukenojo's little rage attack. "Speedy. You idiot."

She flushed. 'Hey! We haven't been on a proper mission together in a long— _hurk!_ ' She choked, dragged backwards by the neck of her shirt yet again by Ryuu, powering forward. Why was this a thing now?! Twice made it a thing and this was not a thing she was enjoying!

'We're operating out of a village to the south, moron, near the River border. Don't you ever listen?'

'Why… are all your things… about hurting me?' she got out, digging her heels in to try and slow their progress.

'How hard is that? Oh, wait. You're terrible at geography  _and_  listening.'

'Not… an answer!'

 

 

 

 

 

Not that that would stop her, she decided later. 'I have another question.'

Ryuu leapt from a branch, veering off further away from her, into the canopy. 'No.'

Raiku easily kept pace, keeping just the bare minimum of chakra on her feet, for strategic reasons. Definitely not because that was all she could do. Because she didn't need chakra augmentation to be fast!

Also because that was all she could do, there was no point in pretending.

The two of them were going in advance of Daisuke and Yamada, and it wasn't a hard pace. Raiku, for one, was frustrated by it. She could only imagine what it was like for Ryuu, who was no longer accustomed to making allowances for other people after so long spent without serious missions. Oh, who was she kidding? He'd never been accustomed to it. It was… it just wasn't very  _fast_. And sure, if Yamada wanted, he could have driven them into the ground and gotten them across the continent by dawn the next day, and she definitely didn't want that, but…

She really just wasn't used to making allowances either, anymore. She had been training with Kakashi for a long time now and they'd stressed mostly pushing her limits until she threw up. And that had been distressingly literal. God, she'd had such trouble keeping her weight up. And her food down.

Anyway, the pace. At least it left her with some headspace to concentrate on other things. 'So if we're going to be heading towards the Land of Rivers, are you worried?'

Ryuu leapt forward and away again, a black and grey blur darting nimbly to try and evade her. 'No.'

She would have to make herself clearer. 'Because last time we went near there, you remember what happened.'

'No.'

Raiku almost lost her footing and had to flail awkwardly to stay upright. 'What?!' she squawked, quickly scrambling to catch up, deftly springing up to Ryuu's level again and following him each time he tried to change direction. 'You don't remember? Really?'

'Nope.' Ryuu pointedly veered away, but Raiku wasn't having it.

'Let me remind you! We were minding our own business, and then we got to this bamboo forest, right, of which Rivers has several—'

Ryuu came to a sudden halt and stamped hard on the branch he'd just reached, snapping it neatly beneath her feet just as she landed. Raiku yelped and quickly sprang up to the one just above, clinging to it with arms and legs and eyeing him around it, warily. He glared up at her. 'I  _remember_ , you idiot,' he gritted out, eyes lit gold from the dappled sunlight coming in through the wind-blown foliage. 'That's a normal person's way of  _ending the conversation_.'

'In my defense,' Raiku said slowly, 'no one here is normal. That's more Daisuke's wheelhouse.' Even then, it couldn't have been normal to sustain that level of anger without having an aneurysm. She'd have to look into it.

Ryuu bared his teeth at her. It was extra frightening because of the sunlight shifting over his tanned features, making his teeth seem both especially white and especially sharp, somehow. Raiku shimmied further down the branch to get some distance. 'Look, you can't blame me for asking!' she yelped. 'That was a bad time for everyone! Especially me!'

'Then what, exactly, are you asking?' The wind was picking up and the sound it made, rustling through the leaves, made it seem like the canopy was pressing in on them. 'Do you think I'm looking forward to that possibility, or that this mission will be a  _problem_  for me, somehow,  _Raiku_?'

'I just asked if you were worried!' she protested. Hesitated. 'Though… now that you've brought all of those points up… you can feel free to address those too?'

Couldn't just let it lie, could she? Nope. So. This was how she died.

'Am I worried?' Ryuu repeated, low. 'It's been three years. I see no reason to worry.' He tilted his head. 'Do you, Gairano?'

'Do… do I?' Raiku asked, voice small, eyes scanning the area around him anxiously for any Plot. There was none that she could see, not even the small one from before. Just Ryuu, looking up at her, looking cat-like, almost feral with his eerie eyes and sharp teeth, light drifting over the sharp planes of his face.

"Oi!"

Raiku's grip slipped and she ended up holding on with just her legs, hanging upside-down and arms dangling to almost hit Ryuu with the swing.

"What part of 'ahead' did you midgets fail to understand?!" Yamada's distant roar made it clear that he and Daisuke had caught up enough to make their supposed grouping a failure, and there would be hell to pay. He didn't sound close, didn't feel close, how did he even—

Right. Raiku really had to pay more attention to the more traditional shinobi practices. He'd be picking up on Ryuu's chakra signature, so Ryuu was the one giving her away.

Stupid, mysterious Ryuu.

But the tension was broken at least. She sighed and swung up to crouch on the branch, adjusting her sleeves where they'd ridden up. 'Come on. We'd better go.'

'If we speed up, keep it up for the rest of the day and don't break for the night, we can reach the place before dawn,' Ryuu said, finally looking away from her.

Raiku brightened, immediately bolstered by the idea of an actual bed instead of a shift on night-watch, followed by forcing the next one on watch out of their bedroll and stealing theirs. 'We could use actual showers!' Well, they could. She would have to wait until everybody else was asleep and then use up the whole tank to avoid anybody else having a heavy water shower, but hey! That was also good!

'You're lazy and spoiled,' Ryuu observed, and Raiku nodded with a cheerful smile on her face.

'Yep! No camping! For years now! I'm not going back until I absolutely have to!'

She wasn't going to share the real reason, which was that Daisuke and Ryuu were not pleasant to be around after a while without showers. Time-skip or not, they were still teenage boys. That, plus her bedroll, when they inevitably stole it? Nope. Not if she could help it. Oh god; that, plus them being grouchy about her totally normal sleep-elbowing?!

The fire of determination, or at least the tiny embers of a desire not to be inconvenienced, suddenly appeared in Raiku. She adjusted her forehead protector, face grim. 'Let's do it.'

'Yamada's not going to like it,' Ryuu said, but from the corner of her eye she could see his mouth quirking up at the corners into a smirk, eyes narrowing.

He wasn't the only thing she could see. Raiku's determination didn't falter, though, even at the flicker of black in her peripheral vision.

Drama magnet or not, she was a Gairano and Gairano did  _not_  let Plots get in the way of their  _totally normal_ lives!


	59. lethal kittens and questionable naming

Ryuu was starting to get tired.

In truth, she was surprised he was keeping up as well as he had been, though she knew that Ryuu maintained speed by consuming the souls of his victims. Or by somehow decreasing air resistance, maybe, but that sounded less like him. Raiku's overpowering velocity was simply part of her nature, as much as the blinding light that came with it, but at least her surly companion could suppress any sound her movement would ordinarily generate. But it took very little effort for her to go fast, as most of her concentration was focused on making sure she kept breathing despite the counterproductive urge to stop. So really, the fact he'd maintained pace was a credit to his hard work. She wouldn't realize how tired she was until she stopped, when she knew from experience it would all catch up at once and probably knock her out as well, but there usually was a catch to everything. At least in the Gairano experience.

The village they ended up in was small. Or, it looked that way on approach, half-hidden by hills, each turn revealing more small, wooden buildings until the surprising scale of the labyrinth could be revealed by degrees. It would have been peaceful, too, the village left sleeping in a fine blanket of mist that lay perfectly still and settled right up until Ryuu and Raiku carved two narrow lines through it. It was old-fashioned, or so she thought while caught up in the blur her surroundings became, unadorned wooden homes with wrap-around terraces and narrow streets that made it hard to navigate on so little sleep. The inn was obvious, mostly because it actually had a chakra presence to speak of, being where any and all shinobi would be staying if they needed to pass through.

Or so she understood by Ryuu's half-caught words, blocked out by the roaring in her ears, the rabbit-fast beat of her heart **.**  They skidded to a stop in a small paved courtyard, the lights within the inn casting a gentle glow over them the pale blue light that preceded dawn.

Raiku swiftly started to stretch out her legs, feeling fatigue start to make itself known in waves of steadily increasing intensity. She had to stretch and she had to pull what felt like a twig out of her calf, because otherwise she'd regret it like hell the next time she woke up.

Ryuu tried to catch his breath, hindered by how he was probably trying not to sound like he needed to. 'Not bad,' he allowed, wiping dirt from his face. Raiku was probably similarly dishevelled, but fortunately her sweat would have largely evaporated from heat and so she wouldn't smell.

She inched away from him. Hopped, since she was still stretching one leg, but at least she could pass it off as trying to keep her balance. She could feel a few small chakra signatures inside the two-story building, too small to be civilians. Kakashi had made it very clear that while civilians never developed their chakra as much and so had small signatures, shinobi would deliberately conceal theirs and go too far the other way, giving themselves away by trying to be subtle.

He'd also made some pointed digs about her total  _lack_  of subtlety, but that was actually pretty fair.

Ryuu staggered up the steps, devoid of his usual grace. 'Finally,' she thought she heard him mutter, but it could just as easily have been something ruder. The little wooden inn's entry room had a front desk next to a set of stairs leading up to the second floor, an archway to what must have been the dining area to the left, and a distinct air of actual domestic comfort that almost made Raiku pass out from relief. It was small and traditional and they would have water and it was going to be glorious.

Not that Raiku and Ryuu were in a state to appreciate any of that. They were exhausted, sore and somewhat distracted.

By the impossible.

'How?' Raiku demanded. Well, more panted, really. 'How?!'

Yamada appeared totally unimpressed, sipping at tea from a cup rendered comically miniscule by his enormous hands. He was visible through the doorway into the other room, sitting at a low table. "You little dipshits should know better."

Ryuu responded to this by simply collapsing. Typical Ryuu, had a quick response to everything, Raiku thought, just a little hysterically.

'How did you … get here before us?!' she wheezed, grabbing at the inn's front counter for support. 'Not… possible!'

Yamada looked mysterious and foreboding instead of answering. This was easy to pull off for a man with scarred lips and more muscles than most countries had citizens. Daisukenojo was nowhere to be seen, or at least he was until Raiku's knees gave out and she saw him passed out under a table.

Yamada must have carried him. Or sacrificed his youth and vitality to some demon to gain superhuman speed because she and Ryuu had been  _relentless_. They had left the other two in the dust and  _no one_  was faster than her. But… she  _had_  had to slow down so Ryuu wouldn't feel threatened and kill her, but still! Yamada was too big to be that fast! The universe forbiddened it. Forbidded it. For…

Raiku squinted. She knew this word. She  _knew_  it, it was just… out of reach, like most words right that second. But weariness was dulling her mind at this point, as the demands of her body were finally given the opportunity to make themselves known after hours of shoving them aside.

Yamada glowered. "I'm a goddamn Jounin and there was no way in hell you morons were going to outpace me. Little shits. Now," he added, tone oddly magnanimous, "I'm gonna chalk this up to new Chuunin enthusiasm and only punish you a little, get me?"

'No,' Raiku whined. It was really very unfair that she was the only one conscious for this, even if she'd known it was coming.

Yamada sipped his tea and forced her to brood in the silence.

Raiku twitched, her vision starting to go dark around the edges, and he finally let the hammer fall.

"No breakfast."

Birds fled in flocks from the trees around the inn at Raiku's piercing wail.

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku and the others had about three hours to sleep while the rest of the town woke around them, before Yamada mercilessly rolled them off their futons and into the harsh light of day.

"You three are gonna look around," he announced, while they struggled blindly around on the mats like oddly lethal newborn kittens, "and I'm gonna get some shut-eye, get me?"

'That seems irresponsible of you.' Raiku wasn't sure which of the boys said it, but it was a valid point. She was busy trying weakly to untangle herself from her sheets. It was embarassingly difficult. The sheets were soft and warm and wrapped around her leaden limbs like an inviting boa constrictor.

Yamada snorted. "You three little bastards are Chuunin now, I think you can handle asking some villagers if they remember a group of bandits. Do  _not_  leave the village, get me? Sullen, I'm looking at you."

Free at last, Raiku had rolled onto her back to look at the wooden ceiling. She could feel tatami mats against the back of her neck, the fine hairs catching on the fibres. That was about all she was capable of registering, except for how dry her throat was and how her stomach was rumbling and her limbs were on fire.

So there were a few things, after some consideration. But she  _could_  go back to sleep, still. She could ignore anything. It was a skill acquired through years of practice.  _Anything_.

"Get me!?"

Except for Yamada's yell, which could have woken the dead. She flipped onto her feet and tripped her way to the door, scrambling over Daisukenojo in her haste, a brief tangle of limbs and pointy elbows and yelping. 'Yes Yamada!'

The innkeeper would be the best bet, she decided as she tripped down the stairs, limbs still sleep-clumsy and landing nowhere she was trying to send them. He was fortunately very conveniently located, sparing them a glance before resuming … whatever he was doing at the desk. He was a middle-aged man, greying brunette and dark-eyed and gloriously average looking. He was actually a little overweight, Raiku noted enviously.

And Raiku could do this. She could  _totally_  do this. She could be suave and investigate-y. She had this one. 'Hello!' she chirped, ignoring how her sleep-rough voice made her sound more like an extremely angry and equally tiny frog. She laced her fingers behind her back. 'Have you seen any criminals?'

To her left, Daisukenojo smacked his hand to his forehead.

The man slowly looked up from his ledger. 'Criminals?' he asked, tone clearly implying that hello, there were three probable murderers standing in front of him and he was only capable of so much tact.

Raiku, a definite murderer, smiled hopefully.

He looked a little exasperated. 'You're a bit new, aren't you?'

That was a little unfair. She wasn't a  _Genin_.

'Please, please ignore her,' Daisukenojo groaned.

'Yes!' she replied, ignoring him instead. 'Thank you for letting us stay here,' she added politely, because good manners were rather important to the Gairano when being rude often implied arrogance, which often implied Drama ahead.

'Tadano Taro,' the innkeeper said, and in her tired, hungry state it took Raiku a moment to realise he was introducing himself and that totally ridiculous name actually belonged to him. Thank god. Such unimaginative rhymes were a good sign.

She was too tired to be especially anxious, but this seemed to be going well. 'Raiku!'

'Well, Raiku,' Taro said, giving her a weary look that she seemed to inspire in people, 'not really. I can't say anyone's come up and said "thanks for the hot water, I'm off to commit crimes".'

Damn.

While Raiku's fatigue-addled mind struggled with this crushing disappointment, Daisukenojo pushed her out of the way and took over. 'Well done,' Ryuu muttered to her, rubbing his temples. Tired didn't look good on him, which was a relief with his Drama levels. He had huge bags under his eyes and he was pale under the tan and his hair was just messy, rather than… artfully mussed. Perfectly normal. It was  _great_.

Daisukenojo looked the same as he always did, but he had had dinner and slept the night before. He came back to them after a few seconds, bowing to Taro with gratitude. 'No big groups have stayed here, except for some of our teams,' he told them around a yawn.

This set off a chain reaction of yawning that gave them all some time to think.

'So we just… ask everybody?' Raiku ventured.

Ryuu snorted. 'This place is surprisingly spread out. It'd take forever. Shops, or the local bar; places like that are the best bet.' **  
**

Raiku hesitated. 'I don't think… are we legally allowed in bars of any kind?'

The two of them gave her a rather dirty look. She threw her hands up. 'What?! I'm the oldest and I'm pretty sure seventeen is still not basically-as-good-as-twenty, at least in the eyes of the law.' Wait, did that apply to shinobi? After a moment of consideration, she decided to just go with what she knew and assume she was in the wrong.  **  
**

There was a long silence. Daisukenojo eventually broke it with a skeptical tone. 'You're seventeen?'

'No way in hell.'

Raiku sputtered. 'I am! How do you not remember that?!'

'Wait. I'm almost seventeen,' Ryuu said slowly, apparently working through what he should have known already. 'So that means she could be.'

'Could— _what_?! I am! You guys were just at the Chuunin Exams! So I spent my birthday alone!' Patently untrue, her dad had made her favorite dinner and quietly wept about what the Gairano called The Danger Zone, or the period of teenage life that marked when the average shinobi became sexually active. Even though she was removed from developments of that nature. But still.

'No, no, because you turned  _thirteen_  when we first took it,' Daisukenojo pointed out, like she didn't know how old she was.

'Yes, and then I spent time wandering around with you guys, getting lost  _without_  you guys, in hospital for ages,' Raiku listed, counting it off on her fingers, 'recovering from being in hospital, which I think is a little unfair, resting even more and missing the  _next_  exam—' and then the whole time mess where somehow time stretched out to make people the ages that were convenient for the story. Her dad had actually aged one year  _less_ , apparently, and he was loving it to no end.

The others just blinked, taking this in.

'…Shit. Really?'

'I think we're still missing a year in there,' Ryuu said, frowning, and Raiku immediately set about steamrolling over this inconvenient thought.

'Well! I am definitely seventeen and that is the end of it! We should really, uh, get started! If we aren't done by the time Yamada gets up, he'll be pissed.' She started pushing her teammates out the door, desperate to cut it off before they looked into things too closely and also tried to convince her she was sixteen when she had  _earned_ seventeen, damnit.

'Stop pushing,  _god_!'

'What the hell is the sudden hurry?'

'Out, out!' Raiku cried, yelling over the two of them until they stood outside in the light of day.

Mostly the light of day. Raiku had braced herself for a wave of heat and slowly, cautiously relaxed when it didn't hit nearly as hard as she thought it would. It was overcast, with pale clouds hanging over the village and softening the light, providing some much-needed relief.

She could avoid summer for at least another day. Glorious. Well, not wholly. The air was still and humid, no breeze to provide relief, but still! Better than nothing.

In the light of day, the village—wait, what was the village called? Crap. Crap, she didn't know. Wait, had she been told? Maybe? Well, this was going to be embarrassing. 'Hey. Not that I don't know, because I clearly do, but just to make sure that  _you_  know,' she said slowly, 'where are we?'

Daisukenojo sighed. 'You didn't read the sign?'

Raiku turned and looked where he was pointing. "Inn of Imichi-son", the sign proclaimed. "The only inn here" was scrawled beneath it, rather more pointedly.

'So… Imichi?' she read slowly, unfamiliar with the reading of the characters.

'Iji,' Daisukenojo corrected.

Raiku glared. No. No, it was impossible. '"Iji"?' she asked sceptically. 'That can't really be the name of this place. It's ridiculous.' The village wrapped around hills couldn't be called "winding path", "crooked path" or any derivation thereof. Nope. Unacceptable. Tadano Taro and now this? This was all  _too_  harmless. It was getting suspicious.

…Also, it sounded like "itchy", and that was totally undignified.

'Well, it is, so shut up. It's not the village's fault that you don't know how to read.'

A fair point. But still, it wasn't like Konoha was imaginative, what with it being surrounded by trees. Maybe it was just their society's pathetic naming conventions? Her name was her in summation, so she could hardly criticize.

It was at roughly this point, being dragged down an unevenly paved, crooked path, that Raiku realized she was being stared at. People were  _staring_  at her. Well, as far as she could see. "Crooked path" was actually incredibly accurate, close-knit buildings separated by the paths winding up and down hills, around high, ivy-covered wooden fences and occasionally stopping entirely in inexplicable dead-ends. They were on what seemed to pass for a main road, wide enough for a whole three, maybe four people, some shops scattered sporadically around with old characters carved into worn overhangings to label their purpose. Too old for her to read, at times—she was hardly an adept scholar, but she usually got by. This was a little like stepping back in time, probably because as far as their country was usually concerned, small villages could take care of themselves. They could usually see about ten meters in front of them at a time before the road twisted again, and saw about that many people in five minutes.

And the people she could see were apparently seeing her with rather more consternation. Raiku was used to it, to a degree; she covered up a lot, after all, and as such was the most shinobi-looking shinobi to ever, uh, shinobi. Plus she was freakishly tall, but still.

After a moment, she realized it was probably both of those things in addition to her hair, white and spiky and longer now, far too obvious. She'd forgotten about it entirely over the time skip, since she'd become so unaccustomed to dyeing her hair even beforehand, but hair like hers  _was not_ normal. Except for Kakashi and oh god that was  _so much worse_. **  
**

Holy shit. She was _funny looking_.

Raiku stopped in the middle of the narrow street and gaped in silent horror.

She was… oh god. She was  _so conspicuous_.  **  
**

'What the hell?' Ryuu pushed her shoulder from behind, held up. 'Why have you stopped?' Already tetchy, which was no surprise. Ryuu didn't like mornings. Or any time of day, really, but he was _particularly_  angry every time the day had the audacity to start without his permission.

One of the young ladies Raiku had seen staring promptly leaned slightly to the side. Raiku gawked at her, uncertain of what was happening.

Ryuu sighed and pushed past her. 'Come on. Try not to get lost.'

The woman stopped leaning.

Raiku then, fortunately, had her second epiphany of the day.

They were leaning to see around her. Because they were staring at Ryuu  _even more_. Well, the young women were.

Ryuu… was shiny.

She relaxed a little, reassured by the idea that it wasn't so much her as it was teenage girls being teenage girls, and also because Ryuu  _finally_  was helping her; his shininess was providing the perfect camouflage for her oddness. Which was a relief, because Gairano didn't like being conspicuous but also hated anything being all about them.

God. That had been a terrifying few seconds.

Raiku, feeling a little more relaxed, quickly drew pace with him again. 'How do we know where we're going?'

'I've got a map!' Daisuke called from a few feet ahead, waving a tiny piece of paper.

'Why don't we go over the buildings?' Raiku asked, leery of any teammate's map-reading skills, as they'd never been tested before **.**  Yamada somehow managed to always know exactly where he was, like he had some internal compass always pointing straight at magnetic Suffering, the least known of the cardinal directions.

'Why don't we just wave a giant sign over our heads saying "come and murder us" to the guys we're looking for?' Ryuu asked sarcastically.

Raiku snorted. 'We're not exactly inconspicuous.'

' _You're_  not.'

'Hey!'

Daisukenojo groaned. 'Oh my  _god!_  Shut up back there!' He stopped and pointed, after a brief map consultation. 'There. There's the bar.'

The small bar was undeniably just that, based off the large hangings with "Bar" neatly written on them. There was a row of bottles lined up along the inner windowsill so they could be seen from the road, just in case someone missed that.

'Well-spotted,' Ryuu drawled. Raiku just huffed, fanning herself with one hand. She had been wrong. The humidity and the lack of breeze had quickly proven worse than the dry heat she was used to, and she was already feeling sticky, the inside of her head feeling muggy. **  
**

Daisukenojo folded the map and stuck it in his pocket. 'Shut the hell up, asshole. So. Who goes in?'

'Ryuu,' Raiku said immediately. 'He looks oldest.'

Ryuu stuck his hands in his pockets. Probably to stop himself from strangling her with them. 'We're all allowed in as long as we don't order alcohol, moron.'

Raiku hadn't been aware of that. She also wished it wasn't true, given that she was apparently not up to asking anybody any questions.

'Oh for the—we'll all go,' Daisukenojo decided, a few minutes being far too long to wait for him.

 

 

 

 

 

The no-smoking rule was more of a guideline in Iji, it seemed. Konoha bars had banned smoking, mostly because drunken behavior, smoking and wooden buildings didn't mix well, but that hadn't crossed over at all. Or at least not very well, judging from the strong smell of tobacco that staged a hostile invasion of Raiku's airways the second she entered.

It was…

Okay, she didn't want to save it was a dive. Diving, after all, was a difficult and noble profession. It was… it was a bit… it had  _character_. Much the way that Ryuu had character, in that it was sketchy and murderous.

It was also blessedly empty. Not entirely, with a few men scattered around at tables alone or in one case, a pair sitting in total silence, but mostly empty! They got a few totally apathetic stares, but there didn't seem to be any staff around. The silence was oppressive, but Raiku was  _on_  that. 'Hello?' she called, bracing her hands on the suspiciously oily bar so she could lean over it to try and see through the doorway to the back. 'Hello-o?'

'Wow,' Ryuu deadpanned. 'Just. Well done.'

'Shut up, asshole,' Daisukenojo hissed. 'Let her do it.' God bless Daisukenojo. Even if he  _did_  think she was at the same mental capacity as his tiny siblings. His mentally tiny siblings, anyway, since most were now physically taller than him, but at least it made him slightly more supportive.

When there was no response, she let her feet hit the floor and pushed herself away, ignoring the tired headrush. 'Do we… come back later?' she asked, blinking in a way that felt oddly uneven.

Daisukenojo and Ryuu exchanged looks. '…How about you sit down?' Daisukenojo suggested after a moment. 'You're looking a little…'

'Just sit down,' Ryuu ordered. Raiku made her way to a nearby stool, at the far end of a table from another bar…drinker. Dweller. D…something.

'Hey,' she greeted when the much older man met her eyes, with what was a totally macho head-nod. '…'Sup.'

He looked away, but Raiku still counted it as a social win. Conversation started up behind her, and when she turned around she saw that Daisukenojo had apparently found the owner. Or at least someone authoritatively grumpy, which was probably as good as.

Which was when she saw it.

Glimpsed it, really, and it wasn't any of her business. It wasn't the one that had been basically throwing a tantrum when she didn't pay attention to it a few days ago, and it wasn't going after her.

…But.

But a Plot was a Plot and she was a Gairano, so she squirmed around until she could see it again. Another glimmer of light on a surface like oil and it vanished. While Daisuke politely showed himself to be the most effective human in their group, Raiku tried her best to discreetly track the tiny black Plot as it slid along the floor. It wasn't a danger at all; it wasn't after her, so there was no need to stop it. The world did run on them, after all. It was more reflex than anything else.

And also curiosity, because it was tiny.  _Unbelievably_  tiny. She'd never seen one so small. But that wasn't a reason for concern. The shape was the odd thing. It was long and stretched out, thread-thin, almost impossible to see until light caught on it, like how a spiderweb could be invisible until it'd been walked into face-first.

Not that that would ever happen to Raiku, what with her acute shinobi senses.

Of course not.

She caught Ryuu's eye and raised her eyebrows in question. He mouthed "nothing" and she slumped.

Goddamnit. No decently sized civilian groups recently using the inn  _or_  the bar. Well, it had been a long shot anyway, since civilian criminals wouldn't make a habit of passing through shinobi-frequented areas, but still. It was disappointing. The Plot was stretching out too far when she looked down again, its tiny mass extended beyond what she would have expected, thin as a hair.

'Toaster! We're going to check out some other places! Come on!'

Raiku dragged her eyes off the floor. 'Yeah, sure,' she said distractedly, and by the time she looked back it had overextended, stretched itself out existence. Well. Omnipresent didn't mean smart.

She made it all the way back to the street before an earlier thought finally completed itself.

' _Denizen_!' she exclaimed, almost startling a passerby out of their skin. 'I knew there was another one!'

 

 

 

 

 

By the time they got back, having hit every store on the main drag and come up with exactly nothing, Yamada was as fresh as a daisy and all Raiku wanted to do was curl up and die. And eat. Ooh, and shower. In any order, but definitely those three things. "So. Find anything?"

Ryuu stretched his fingers, probably antsy after a violence-free day. 'We discovered that Raiku is really conspicuous. Permission to henge her or hide her in a cupboard?'

Raiku smacked his shoulder irritably, even as Yamada considered this idea. "No," he decided eventually. "We might be here a while and the last thing we need is her exploding out of a henge and scaring someone shitless, get me? Same goes for the cupboard."

Raiku glared. 'Gee. Thanks.' Whatever she'd been about to add to the conversation died in her throat as they entered the dining room and saw four figures, standing side-by-side at the counter. 'ANBU,' she said instead, eyes wide.

Daisuke followed her gaze. 'Hey, yeah. Cool.'

'Should they be in an inn?' Raiku wondered, still a little stunned. The four of them wore the iconic heavy brown coats and their traditional white masks, the two combining to completely hide gender and identity. It looked like… Raiku craned her neck to see what their masks were. Cat, Demon, Monkey-Demon-Thing-Maybe, and another she couldn't see from that angle. 'As in, right there? Super obvious?'

Ryuu rolled his eyes. 'What, you think they sleep in burrows?'

'Hey, no, I have a point here! It's not exactly covert! Anybody could ask "oh hey, seen any ANBU recently?" and it isn't like civilians are trained to stand up to torture even if they didn't want to answer,' she pointed out. '…Like I'm not. Y'know, I never did get an answer on the t-word yesterday—'

"We're at a border we share with two countries, Speedy,' Yamada informed her, steering her towards a seat. "If there  _weren't_  ANBU passing through here, that'd raise some questions. Get me?"

That actually made a lot of sense. Huh. She wasn't used to coincidences anymore. **  
**

They were _awesome_.

"Anyway. What'd you find?"

'Nothing,' Raiku replied, dejected. 'Not exactly a main civilian stop, and it's close enough to Rivers that people don't want to stick around, just in case.'

'Neither the inn nor the bar had any changes in traffic,' Ryuu added.

'And neither of these shits know how to talk to people,' Daisukenojo finished. Ryuu glared at him, but it was half-hearted at best. Even he had trouble functioning on so little sleep.

Raiku fidgeted. The ANBU were still picking up their food, presumably to eat in their rooms. They were drawing in attention. They were a black hole in her mind's eye.  _ANBUANBUANBU_.

Daisukenojo and Ryuu kept casting them looks as well, so at least it wasn't just her. The same went for the only other person in the room, a civilian who probably just wanted to eat out for a change and now found himself horribly discomfited.

Yamada, on the other hand, seemed totally at ease. It took her a moment to understand why.

The thing about Yamada that she tended to forget was that he was actually strong. Not physically strong, that was impossible to forget, but significant amongst his peers. Yamada was a Jounin and had probably been ANBU himself. He would never be as strong as he should be, could have been, though. He wasn't Plot necessary, his relative insignificance both a blessing and a curse. He wasn't discomfited at all by the ANBU, at least, which made her feel better about their presence.

Yamada stretched. "Well, shit. You guys do what you gotta do to look less like zombies, and I'll do some recon out of the village proper, get me?"

Ryuu yawned. 'Sure.' Raiku, never one to miss an opportunity to eat, was already munching on a stolen breadstick, but nodded vigorously.

The ANBU made their way past them, and Raiku almost died when her sharp inhale threatened to choke her on her breadstick.

A tiny Plot clung to one of their coats.

 _Another_  one.

Raiku frowned, thumping her chest to dislodge crumbs. That was annoying. She hadn't seen the petulant Plot since the day before, and here was a third? God. Konoha-nin were the worst for this sort of thing. Proximity to the Main Storyline seemed to create a sort of… narrative susceptibility. The ANBU's passenger was small, not even emitting noise, probably some fragment lost off something bigger that had once involved the ANBU member but had since decided that they weren't necessary.

Still. She still needed a good deed for the day. Raiku wasn't smooth, but she was actually so awkward she was getting there simply by being so far up the other end of the spectrum. Much like how if someone walked for long enough in the opposite direction to their destination, they'd eventually go around the world and end up where they needed to be. She braced herself for annihilation and leaned over. 'Oh, you have a bug on you. I'll just, uh…' she said, and smacked Cat's shoulder a little harder than they would have thought necessary. The Plot didn't need a lot of force but it was small enough that direct contact with a Gairano made it deflate with a disgruntled squeak. Her hand bounced off muscle and  _god_ , what were they feeding these people? The ANBU didn't say anything, mercifully, just stopped and faced her while she broke out in a terrified sweat, still-outstretched hand starting to shake.

After an eternity of silence, they just nodded. When she turned around the only civilian in the dining room was staring at her, and she could only assume that her casual smack to an ANBU had horrified him. Daisukenojo had his mouth hanging open, and Ryuu was already halfway out of the room.

She dusted off her hands. It hadn't been necessary, sure, but it was a tiny Plot and the ANBU had it hard enough without unnecessary drama, so she considered it a job well done. Plus, her day had otherwise been extremely unproductive, giving them no leads to speak of, so at least she'd done  _something_. Losing track of that persistent Plot from before had already counted against her. But... they hadn't found any leads. She was used to things going a bit faster, and...

Without a Plot, she was slowly figuring out, missions often went really  _slowly_. It was all... investigating and questioning and looking for tiny, tiny clues and waiting for random strokes of luck if those failed. How long was this going to take? Tracking down a group of criminals should have been easy, but they were doing it in stages only  _starting_  with Iji so maybe she hadn't fully escaped camping after all? What if—

Wait. Wait, Ryuu was leaving.

'Dibs on first shower!' she called.

There was a snarl of outrage from the lobby. 'Like hell!'


	60. genius and the terminally murder-shy

The following weeks would prove exactly one thing, the somehow interminably long stretch of days sending just that one message:

Raiku hated being right.

Well, no. It wasn't like she could really tell, given how rarely it happened, but evidence suggested it so far!

…With a recorded occurrence of one.

Okay, so maybe she just didn't like it this time. She had to think of a better way of labeling things, just for her own internal consistency.

She had been right and,  _perhaps coincidentally,_  she was really not liking the circumstances. Better! **  
**

...Also it had only been a week and a bit. Two, more like, but it hadn't been _that_  long.

In related news, it was rapidly becoming clear that "simple" was shinobi code for "unbearably tedious". The criminals had either retired or moved on or possibly gradually mummified from inactivity; it could have been anything, really, but whatever it was, it was inconsiderate. **  
**

God.

Raiku flopped back onto the tiles of the inn's roof and sighed heavily.

All she wanted to do was murder these people. The most she'd expected to wait was for Yamada to possibly question them, but this? Was a little  _courtesy_  too much to ask? What were they, murder-shy?

She shifted in place, terracotta sticking uncomfortably into a shoulder blade.  _And_  it was hot. It was  _weirdly_  hot for such overcast weather. The whole place was just drowning in humidity that made Raiku occasionally twitch and electrocute something by accident, just from sheer build-up. She'd had the gall to ask Ryuu to do something about it two days into the fruitless searching, and he'd not only refused, but had launched into a somehow blistering lecture on meteorological phenomena and the complexities thereof that had made Raiku's eyes glaze over.

Enduring the following predictably muggy days had been worth not having to hear the lecture twice, but only just. **  
**

'Hey Raiku!'

Raiku didn't bother lifting her head, sweat-damp hair sticking to the tiles already. 'Hey Tadano.' There was the distinct rumbling of wheels on paving stones. He was wheeling supplies inside from his mid-afternoon grocery run. Every day he would go and get it, grab some tea with his sister, wheel the food back inside and make sure the shinobi on the roof was still alive and hadn't dehydrated to death.

This was what it had come to. She was part of a civilian's  _routine_.

Raiku sighed again. This couldn't go on. She was a Chuunin. She had killed people. They'd been sweeping the area in increasingly wide patrol circles and there was no sign of anyone and she was stuck at home base because apparently starting a forest fire wouldn't be helpful here.

Which, hello, it was certainly one way to solve the problem. But there weren't even any Plots for her to angst over! Her Brooding quota was already met, she had no one to talk to, and the Genematrix didn't even have the decency to have something lurking around for her to avoid.

Raiku wondered idly if she should buy sunglasses. Wasn't UV damage supposed to be higher on cloudy days? And she was spending a lot of time on the roof and  _no_ , she wasn't pining for her teammates,  _Daisukenojo_. She'd tried to buy a little handheld fan and it had, predictably, suffered a tragic death very quickly, but sunglasses should be safe, right?

…Well no, her common sense, the Gairano part of the brain pointed out. They were made of plastic. She was lucky enough to just go through clothes fast, the last thing she needed was sunglasses permanently fused to her skin and severe burns to go with her snazzy new eyewear. She'd just have to put up with the heat and humidity and hope that Ryuu finally snapped and mustered up some wind before she slowly sweated to death.

She pulled at her shirt and tried to fan some cooler air under her mask.

The clouds above weren't moving. They were just sitting there, not even having the decency to make shapes for her to attach needlessly sentimental meaning to. She couldn't even  _reminisce_  with such drab scenery and that was so many levels of unfair. Iji was actually very picturesque, after all, all hills and ivy and old stone roads and the least she could do was attach some nostalgia to it for later fond remembrance moments, but no.

Nope.

Raiku was starting to get the sneaking suspicion that the flipside of Gairano getting to live boring lives was being bored  _all the time_  if they were shinobi and so not allowed to take opportunities to just have exciting social lives. Most Gairano could spice up their lives as long as it was Drama free, but shinobi were under much stricter limitations. It was an unwelcome thought, so she promptly pushed it away and sat up.

Something had to be done.

She looked around guiltily, certain her dad would show up out of nowhere and catch her getting fired up. When he failed to materialize and criticize her lack of passivity, she relaxed a little, but the damage had already been done. She knew better. She couldn't go causing trouble. She had to lie low. They would find the surprisingly elusive criminals eventually, and only free-will-deficient weaklings had to rely on some… omnipotent narrative causality matrix.

She groaned and let herself fall backwards again, fanning herself.

And wasn't that just a little unfair? Plus, Ryuu and Daisuke hated the slow lack of progress too, getting crankier each time they came back for the day. They also were openly irritated that she wasn't allowed to help at that stage, getting what they saw as the easy job.

Which was totally inaccurate, since Raiku was hyperactive at best and a psychotic lightning ferret at worst. Boredom was, while usually glorious, not exactly something she came to naturally.

Raiku huffed, glaring at the still, overcast sky.

This was going to be so  _good_  for her. She was going to  _adjust_  and it was  _character-building_  instead of Character-building which meant it was going to be difficult and irritating.

Speaking of.

'Hey! You lazy shit, when we asked you to keep watch, you were supposed to keep watch!' Raiku twitched, her tetchy teammate's voice an unwelcome call back to the real world. Bad moods again. Perfect.

Though, she thought, snickering because she was secretly hilarious; who could tell the difference?

 

 

 

 

 

She'd been right. She'd also been assigned the last shower, which was less awful, since they rarely smelled good without one and she'd just ruin the tank anyway.

Besides, the joke was on them, Raiku knew, smiling so widely that it hurt. It was on them because  _the kitchen was all hers_. Ryuu would be lurking outside the bathroom, towel slung over one lea—

She forcefully stopped herself, jabbing her chopstick into the back of her hand so that the pain would reinforce the message about things that were  _not okay_  to notice.

Ryuu. Would be lurking outside the bathroom, towel slung over one…  _lackadaisically_ slouched shoulder, tapping his foot and timing how long Daisukenojo took. Daisuke would be taking deliberately more than the agreed-upon eight minutes because Ryuu was the one who'd set the terms and all the while, she would be eating her way through the food the inn had prepared for the first round of dinner.

Sometimes her genius was frightening.

'So you didn't find anything?' she asked, looking up from where she had instinctively hunched over her food to protect it from predators.

Yamada let out a jaw-cracking yawn. "Nah. Nothing to find. Bastards are laying low."

'Maybe I could go next time!' she suggested, trying for casual and ending up with startled, somehow. 'I can do it faster!'

Yamada raised his non-existent eyebrows. "Yeah, and then when this part of the country goes up in flames, I can report it as a success. Get me?"

He had to learn how to let things go. 'One time.  _One time—,_ '

"Besides," he continued, grabbing his chopsticks now that Raiku had swept through the shared dishes like a typhoon and resources were getting scarce, "I've got another job for you to do. On your own, get me?"

Raiku froze, mouth full of noodles.

"I want you to look around."

Raiku waited for the catch, and eventually swallowed when she didn't think he was about to try and make her choke with indignation. 'That's all?' she managed.

Yamada looked at her evenly. She stared back, totally baffled. 'Is… is that not what I was doing?' she asked, slowly.

He sighed, tapping his chopsticks together in one hand, like he was wishing for a crab claw to crush her windpipe with. "Let's try this again, Speedy."

He leant forward.

"You should  _look around_ , get me?" he said meaningfully, making terrifyingly intense eye contact.

'Oh. Oh, yes, I get you,' Raiku lied, thoughts scrambling to find an answer in the disorganized filing cabinet she dared to call her brain.

Oh, she knew, did she?

Raiku squinted as Yamada turned his attention to the food of his that she'd been thoughtlessly sliding away from him and towards herself, staking a tiny coup against her surprisingly strong grip.

So there was this rumour, her mind produced reluctantly while that low-key culinary battle went on, that Gairano could sometimes find people.

But wait. Wait wait wait. They could only find  _Plot relevant_  people, and there were no such people there, Raiku pointed out, countering her own thought.

…But Yamada didn't know that, so he'd be expecting her to try. It was an irritable, critically aware thought, distinctly Gairano flavored. She was having a much easier time keeping track, nowadays, but that one stuck out.

She leant back in her chair, letting her head fall back and Yamada finally have his meal unassailed. Great. She'd have to scrounge fruitlessly around the village, getting stared at and profoundly lost in little high-walled, twisting streets, and they'd eventually find her mummified and emaciated body in an alley. Yamada would be disappointed at her corpse and the sheer power of it would haunt her in the afterlife.

God, shinobi life was glamorous.

'Where the hell is the food?' Daisuke complained, throwing himself into the chair across from her, red hair damp and the rest of him smelling oddly of violets.

Raiku valiantly managed to resist looking guiltily down at the empty dishes stacked in front of her. '…There was. An. It…' she faltered, never breaking wide, beseeching eye contact. '…It attacked me.'

Daisuke narrowed his eyes, looking more threatening than a floral-scented man had any right to look. 'Oh you son of a  _bitch_.'

"Speedy's done anyway," Yamada said, quickly snatching the last pickled radish. "She's got things to do."

'I do?' Raiku asked uncertainly.

Yamada slowly looked up from his food, and his expression spoke volumes.  _I cannot possibly be expected_ , it began,  _to put up with the likes of_ , it continued, and Raiku decided to be true to herself and skip over the difficult parts.

'I do!' she said brightly. 'And it isn't secret! I just.'

What.

'Why do I just say everything that I think?!' she hissed to herself, gripping her hair like she could pull her uncooperative brain cells out with it. Being alone for days on end was making her already stunted social filters atrophy. This was a disaster.

Daisukenojo laughed, surprisingly amused rather than enraged. 'Wow. Just. That was pretty bad. You are the worst liar I have ever seen. Is this that Gairano thing? You giving that a try?'

'What?! No!' Raiku squawked. 'It's not that! I don't even know what that is!'

He snorted. 'My mother's a medic. I hear everything.'

 _What_.

"Now that this moron has told the whole room," Yamada said, giving the evil eye to the only other person present, a civilian who looked like he'd rather be giving himself an amateur lobotomy than sitting near the enormous man, "you can get on with it."

'What, alone? You're just sending me off, a seventeen year old girl, in the dead of night—' **  
**

'Six-thirty, toaster, it's barely past sunset yet—'

'—in the  _utter darkness_  in a  _strange village_  when there are  _rampaging murderers_  around that we can't find—'

"You wanna take Sullen?" Yamada asked, voice deceptively pleasant.

Raiku froze.

'"Strange village?"' Daisukenojo echoed, totally ignoring her sudden impression of a statue. 'Strange!? We've been here for weeks! You've been all over the place! People are so used to you buzzing around that they don't even stare anymore!' He gestured at her up and down to emphasize how very odd-look-worthy she was.

"Sullen it is," Yamada said with relish.

'Hey! Like hell. She's eaten everything here! I wanna go and get some goddamn food!' Daisukenojo protested.

Raiku coughed self-consciously. 'I'm a growing girl,' she mumbled.

'Growing is right, you're a billion feet tall and fifty elbows worth of pointy—'

'What the hell are you guys arguing about?' Ryuu grumbled, sinking into the chair next to her.

'Don't get comfy. You guys are eating on the move,' Yamada said, pushing his plate away and settling back in his chair.

Ryuu slowly turned to glare at Raiku.

She held her hands up. 'Hey! Why do you assume it's my fault?!'

'Is it?' he asked.

Raiku's averted gaze apparently was enough of a yes for him to start growling.

 

 

 

 

 

'So what, exactly, are we doing?' Ryuu asked waspishly, and she could tell how annoyed he was by the sharp sound of his heels hitting the stone pathway. He only made noise when he wanted people to know their doom was coming, presumably so he would feed off their terror. It was night and it should, by all rights, have been cooler, but the humidity was sticking around even as lights began to appear in the houses they passed, rectangles of yellow light cast ahead on their path.

'Toaster's apparently gonna look helpless until they feel bad for us and come out,' Daisukenojo answered from where he was walking on the left of stone walls lining their path. They were old, bracketed with ivy and every now and again, one careless step would send a smaller piece of stone onto the road. If she looked up, the thick, slow-moving clouds would sometimes let enough moonlight through to light a point in the sky, but the night was otherwise muggy, thick and the darkness almost complete but for the houses.

It was all very picturesque. Raiku frowned, the quiet of it all starting to make her suspicious.

'But really,' Ryuu said, after a period of silence made it clear he wasn't getting a more serious answer.

Raiku shrugged helplessly, keeping her eyes cast up at the sky, hands in her pockets. 'Apparently there's a rumor,' she began, knowing her obvious reluctance would solve a lot of this for her, 'that people in my family can sometimes have good luck finding people.'

'Your family is good at weirding people out and staring blankly, and that's about it,' Ryuu said, ruthlessly blunt.

Raiku struggled not to blush, ducking her head. 'Thank you,' she mumbled, bashful.

' _God_  you're weird,' Daisukenojo snorted, but he fortunately sounded more affectionate than anything else. 'I'm gonna go score some takoyaki.'

'Get me some as well, asshole!' Ryuu yelled after him just as the redhead leapt out of view.

As Daisukenojo's almost inaudible expletive faded into nothing, Raiku realized too late what the dark streets and the heat were doing.

 _Ambience_.

They settled into silence, Ryuu thinking of something that was probably unpleasant for others and Raiku fuming at her slip-up. How could she have missed that? It was so ominous or…  _something else that was definitely not applicable_ , and she'd just whoops! Blitzed right through it! Like Yamada wanted all three of them out, where they could cause trouble with three times the efficiency! Like hell if she was going to let this slide.

She eyed the ground. She had to be wary. This sort of atmosphere, with this lighting, with their profession and demographic? They were prime Plot-bait.

Oh, a Plot would spring up, alright. She just had to snipe the sucker before it latched on.

'Hey.  _Hey_. I'm talking to you,' Ryuu snapped.

She huffed. 'Inevitably.'

'What was that?!'

Raiku jerked back from where she'd been leaning towards a suspicious shadow—nothing but a startled-looking black cat. 'What?'

Ryuu rolled his eyes. He looked tired, she realized. Even fresh out of a shower, damp but somehow free from the floral scent, he seemed slightly bleary-eyed.

Raiku wondered if violets could be scared of people. If they could, would that apply to their extract? Had he somehow terrified the smell away? Wait, was that the only soap left? Would she have to smell like Daisukenojo, or had he brought that soap in-

Ryuu snapped his fingers. 'Focus!'

'What, what?!' Raiku skittered to the side slightly, getting some distance between them as they kept walking forward.

Ryuu exhaled sharply but closed his mouth, eyes fixed ahead. Now that he had her attention, in true Ryuu fashion, he didn't seem to want it. Of course.

'They aren't here,' he said eventually, aggressively, like he was daring her to question such an incomprehensibly random statement.

'I know,' she said carefully. 'We… you guys haven't found them.' Her foot snagged on a rough stone and she squawked, lurching forward before she caught her balance. When she finally got her composure back, the moonlight coming in through the clouds was a little brighter, the still air faintly scented with some faint floral smell.

Well played, Genematrix, she thought grimly. If her flailing hadn't killed the ambience, it really was playing to win.

Therefore, the sharp smack to the side of her head took her totally by surprise.

'The assholes from before!' Ryuu snapped. 'Those people!'

'Who?!' she demanded, scrambling backwards to get up the high stone wall, ignoring the ivy getting caught in her clothes. When she was a safe distance from the ground and steady atop the wall, she crouched. Ready to flee.

Ryuu glared at her. His eyes were very yellow and looking down at him from above made his features seem even sharper. She'd noticed on the tree, but this was getting out of hand and because she was so on top of this, she'd already thought of a solution if it were ever to happen again. There was only one thing to do.

Raiku tilted her head to the side.

It made the scar on his eyebrow make his face seem asymmetrical. Squinty, maybe. Gairano had discovered that Genematrix machinations often failed when the viewer looked ridiculous, which they excelled at.

Raiku in particular.

There. That done, she could finally spare a thought to what he was actually saying.

'Those people,' she repeated. 'Those…'

People.

Guilt struck her like Ryuu ordinarily would have physically. She blanched. 'Oh your,' family family family family, 'not… family,' she finished lamely, almost cross-eyed with the effort of not saying the opposite. 'Biological… not-family.'

Ryuu's irritated exhale hissed out of him, mostly because he'd never found another verb he liked better. He looked up at her with a sort of defiant anger, like he was daring her to judge him for bringing it up.

'And that's… good,' Raiku guessed carefully, eyeing him to see if this was correct.

He scowled.

'That's… bad?' she corrected, uncertainly.

His scowl deepened. Any second now the wind would pick up and then she'd be shoved off the wall by it. A high, distraught whine burst out of her before she could restrain it. 'What do you want from me?!'

'Admit you were wrong!' he demanded, but something was off. His arms were folded and he seemed oddly… something. Something not pure anger, and she would know; it had been directed at her enough.

'Well… maybe they got the message? Your messages? Angry, angry messages?'

Oh god; a sliver of teeth was showing, a clear sign of aggression. 'I haven't sent them shit!'

'Exactly! Maybe they… gave up?' Gave up. It resonated for a moment, and in an uncharacteristic moment of understanding, she realized why he was so strange, why such mixed signals were coming through.

Oh.

Maybe his family had given up on him.

Against her will and better judgment, she could feel her expression softening with no real direction from her.

Oh.

She could almost feel Ryuu's rage spiking, or maybe that was the sudden presence of a breeze for the first time in weeks, but it was then, because of course it was then, that she spotted the first Plot she'd seen in almost as long. It was thin, so thin it looked almost like a particularly long and weirdly oily piece of string until the light caught it and it seemed to move—

Not move, she realized. The light was moving and just passing over where it was stretched out, which gave it the illusion of…

Vanishing.

Ryuu was saying something in clipped and angry tones but there was a ringing in Raiku's ears that drowned him out, the high scream of sheer indignation at Genematrix machinations that came from deep within her Gairano DNA, from the stretch and strain of the very fiber of her being.

That.

Mother.

 _Fucker_.

Raiku scrambled off the wall and dashed forward, shoving past Ryuu in hot pursuit of the slippery little fucker. 'What the fuck!?' his call echoed behind her, but she didn't have time to write a will or listen to her impending doom because she was going to  _smite this motherfucker_.

It was disappearing as she moved but it wasn't moving, oh no; it was hiding, burying itself in the narrative potential weave of the world, reducing its vulnerability and its visibility all at one.

She ripped off a glove as her sprint took her skidding around a corner, hand clapping down on stone a scant second after the Plot sunk down beneath it. 'Come on,' she hissed, the momentum carrying her too far forward and forcing her to spring off the opposite wall to keep up. It was disappearing faster and faster, hurtling around corners almost as fast as she was but she was catching up, she was not going to be outrun by some slimy little—

Raiku really only registered the bar when she'd burst already in through the doors. The sudden shocked silence and the yellow lighting stunned her for a moment, a blow to her sudden laser focus.

Raiku swallowed, every muscle suddenly tense. She didn't even bother trying to fight down the blush; she just thanked god the mask was hiding it.

Her bare hand suddenly felt conspicuously naked, skin itching with sudden paranoia.

The various civilians gathered stared at her. She couldn't help but notice most of them were older men, which she felt was an unfair stereotype.

Then again, the Genematrix had put a fair bit of energy into sneakiness, so it was probably worn out.

She could still see it at the bottom of her vision, coiled around the bottom of a chair leg. Taunting her. She could hardly just storm up to the table, stamp her foot and run—

Wait. Wait, could she do that?

Raiku shook her head. No, no, that would be ridiculous even for her. Luckily, it appeared some semblance of continuity was on her side.

'What the hell was that?!' Ryuu demanded, appearing behind her and forcing her to spin around and dart a few steps back. His sudden appearance did nothing to ease the tension in the air, but did give Raiku a chance to slowly inch backwards towards where she remembered the stupid thing being. Especially as it just looked like she was backing way from his continuous derision.

Wow, she thought, eyeing how his hair was starting to get more sharply stylized; he was really worked up.

Meanwhile, Raiku shifted her weight backwards, one heel pushing towards the thread slowly, the slow pressure silent on hardwood.

She just needed to get an impression of it, she rationalized. She'd thought it was gone and that was weird enough. It was thin enough that getting it right would be tricky, the thing weak enough that she could step into it before realizing.

She risked another glance and it was miles off, this was going to take forever if she didn't want it to be obvious and she was going to have to

A floorboard creaked.

_seehowtheyshallIyouthinkyouseehowtheyyouthinkshall I tell you_

You think you're safe,

_Teeth._

_She can see them in the dark and in the redbright light flickering over skin, over the curve of that mouth. Teeth. Sharp and white and so terribly perfect and she can feel hardwood under her feet and palms and she can feel no such thing, nothing there but heat and rage and the pressure of another heart against her chest where her ribs expand against pain. Teeth. Sharp and white and so perfect,_

because I can't touch you.

Oh, Raiku _._

 _A sigh, indulgent and a knife of a smile where there should just have been the sound of a scream and the smell of burning flesh because nobody touched her,_ nobody _—_

There is no safe from me.

_a storyyouthinkyou'reshallI_

There was an unbearable pressure building inside her skin, the spaces between bone and ligament pulling and stretching and expanding until it

snapped

and

She exploded out of the sway of it just as something hit the front of her chest hard and she was moving backwards, feet leaving the ground and the world spinning and there was a noise, impossibly loud and there was yelling and

'Easy!' Daisukenojo's voice sliced through the din. 'Raiku, easy! Everything's fine! Calm down!'

Raiku tried to suck in a breath but it wasn't enough, all her air gone, gasping like a fish left on the riverbank on her back, staring up at the dark sky. The stars were swimming, her ears were ringing and the pressure in the air was built up like there was a thunderstorm no one could see but her.

She could feel the stone vibrating underneath her back, moving but not moving, the potential for moving if something or Something demanded it and she…

She had a very bad feeling.

'What the hell was that—'

'It's nothing, she's fine—'

Daisukenojo. Daisukenojo would help and she was on her feet again with the world spinning and

'—just out of nowhere—'

there was a meaty thud and a yell of pain and 'Raiku!' Daisukenojo snapped her out of her the lurch backwards, stomach clenching to stop the fall and curl her in on herself. 'What the hell!?'

'What?!' she gasped, reaching out a hand to his shoulder to steady herself, hurt when he jumped backwards.

'Are you trying to kill me!?' He wasn't afraid but he was annoyed, maybe concerned and  _god_  it was so hard to read faces sometimes, when her head was pounding like this.

'Hello?!' he gestured up and down and wow that was a lot of people behind him, and all of them looked either drunk or angry or both,  _drungry_ , if you will—her spirally thought-ramble was cut off by another flailing gesture.

Raiku looked down at herself reflexively and oh god. 'Oh god!' she shrieked, curling around herself and wrapping her arms around her stomach like that would hide the fact she was  _glowing white and sending sparks everywhere_ , what was she  _thinking_  it wasn't like she was trying to hide the fact that she was  _naked_  or something!

'That's not helping!' Ryuu accused from somewhere near the front of the small crowd ( _mob_ ) and a particularly antsy man stepped forward just for a tanned hand to grip him by the ear and yank backwards, Ryuu briefly appearing between people as the world's worst possible crowd control.

'Just… do something! Fix it!' Daisukenojo suggested, helpful as ever.

'I'm not a broken radio!' Raiku exclaimed, voice shrill.

'You'll be broken in a second!' An unknowingly suicidal drunk shoved Ryuu, another in the small group of jostling bodies and Ryuu slowly turned, incredulous with homicidal mania. To protect herself legally and to help with concentration or whatever, she closed her eyes.

What was that, Raiku, she demanded of herself, closing her eyes and trying to calm herself down.

As she did, the roar of noise settled into an equally unsettling yelling, mostly male voices all raised in anger or alarm.

Right. They were among civilians, she rationalized to herself as the crackle-hum started to retreat from the surface of her skin. Not exactly normal.

Or polite, even in Konoha. A giddy, disbelieving laugh almost escaped before another pained yelp reminded her Ryuu's limited experience with non-fatal interaction.

There was a

_thinkyou'resafethereisnosafethereisnosafethereisnosafe_

Raiku recoiled but it followed, a wave of narrative pressure pushing in on her temples, on her throat, on her hands where they were shaking, voices and images and it was happening, it was happening and going to happen and to have happened and it was someone's certainty that

_there_

_is_

_no_

_safe_

_from_

_me_

_you'rejustsoquietIdon'twantyoutodieshallIbaremyteethforyouseehowtheyrunseehowtheyrunseehowseehowseehow_

The sound of the crowd's collective voice rose sharply in pitch, fuel added to fire in the narrative black swarming in the air so thickly that she couldn't breathe anymore.

Daisukenojo cursed, hands twitching towards his weapon pouch while Raiku gagged, trying to pull herself up into a standing position under the impossible weight, heat starting to rush through her system again at the feeling of dangerdanger _danger_

There was a sudden drop in pressure; Raiku gasped, suddenly too light after the tidal wave, the air too clear and sharp in her lungs, everything colored with clarity painful for the contrast.

She felt sick.

She felt  _sick_.

It felt like she was bleeding when she wasn't, it felt like there was some pain both in her head and somewhere in front of her, the pain of something being where it shouldn't and where she could see it and she knew she had to but she didn't _want_  to—

Raiku dragged her head up, eyes watering with the effort of keeping them open when she wanted so desperately, instinctively, to keep them closed.

The small crowd was no longer unsettled and had moved to aggressive, and there was a hole in the world standing in front of them, oil-black and painful and impossible for her to keep her eyes on for long, human-shaped but nothing like it, Plots wrapped around each other in a gross caricature of a person and it had to die. It had to die it had to die it had to  _die—_

'Gairano!' it snapped in a voice that was thousands of voices, shouting and screaming and sobbing and it was snarling, black curling around perfect white, perfectly sharp teeth in a face made of oil and flashes of other people's lives wrapped around, sliding over each other.

'Ryuu!' Daisukenojo shoved its shoulder. 'You're just freaking her out! Get her out of here so I can do some goddamn damage control!'

_Seehowtheyseehowtheyseehowthey_

_see_

Raiku opened her mouth and closed it again, over and over, trying to summon words, to scream, to do something and all that came out was

'Ryuu?'

It rolled its eyes, black orbs in a face that light escaped from with the shift of each black-slick muscle under a filmy sheet of narrative. 'No kidding. Let's go!'

_how_

Unable to do anything else, she stumbled after it because this was it, it had to  _die_.

'Hey!' she yelled, shoving it violently in the shoulder and bringing her still bare hand up as it was forced to spin, clapping it to the side of its unprotected face.

_they_

It stared at her and Raiku stared back, paralyzed.

She stared back, her bare hand pressed against its bare face and she couldn't breathe, couldn't get air in through the sudden shock and the crash of denial. She could feel skin under her hand where she could see no such thing under the Plot, warm and smooth and the shift of it over fine bones when it opened its mouth to speak. 'What?' it asked, irritably.

Not for the first time that night, Raiku drew breath to speak and found she had nothing to say.

_run._


	61. nothing but cliche

Her palm itched.

Yamada was yelling at them. "One thing, I ask you to do  _one thing_ ," he was telling them, working himself up into a full-on dressing down. Obviously he had to pace himself. These things couldn't be rushed. "I gave you  _one_   _job_ ," he was continuing, and Raiku had her fingers curled into her palm because she couldn't stop the skin from tingling, couldn't stop herself from being too aware of the nerves there, where the fabric was touching her hand.

But she wasn't staring where she wanted to, which was a point in her favor. She was instead staring fixedly at the floor, which made her look ashamed for Yamada's benefit but more importantly, stopped her from looking at. Looking at. **  
**

It.

 _It_  made her so angry she was sick with it, her stomach churning and bile rising in the back of her throat whenever it spoke in that horrible approximation of a voice that was all a Plot could really manage. She could almost  _hear_  it each time the thing shifted, hear the slick slide of storyline shifting over raw narrative potential, and that was ridiculous. It was purely visual, the oily black of Plot, and it didn't make sound because it wasn't  _physical_  the way real things were physical, but she could and did hear it, and her palm itched.

She only realized she was grinding her teeth when Yamada's yell reached the volume where she could feel the vibration in her jaw, combining with the pressure to create a sharp stab of pain.

"And you!" He rounded on her. Plot or no, she couldn't not pay attention, he was just too big. "What the hell were you thinking!?"

'I don't know what happened!' she protested, shrinking back and pressing herself to the wall to try and make herself smaller. It was useless **;**  even in her comforting cower, she was taller than Daisukenojo. 'I think historically we have proven that using me for any kind of secretive action on my own is a fifty-fifty chance to fail!' she added, realizing too late just how accusatory her tone was.

'It wasn't her fault,' the thing grumbled before Yamada could fully deep enough breath to yell at her. 'They were riled up when we got there and she just reacted.'

Yamada slowly turned to face it and how could he not see it, how could he not  _see it there—_

"Oh, and that makes it okay to go nuclear?" he asked, voice dangerously mild.

It snorted. Maybe. She couldn't readily identify the sound, but the movement of its shoulders was familiar. 'No. But it was gonna go bad either way.'

Yamada looked back at her, somehow demanding.

'That's… right,' she confirmed, reluctantly, knowing it was her only way out but wanting to gag at going along with the Thing. 'That is what. What happened.'

Daisukenojo's face suddenly blocked her view of Yamada, freckled features sent into a frown. 'You seem... Hey, none of them actually got you, right?'

Raiku closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath, but when she opened them it hit her, a sudden flash of story and Daisukenojo was strongbrave _loyal_  and he was  _pale, so pale and he was gasping, he was going to bleed out in the dirt and he was never gonna make it, was always doomed because that's what happened to people with more integrity than cunning because_

Raiku choked on air and it fractured, and

_Daisukenojo smiled at someone and he was old and he was reminiscing about the team he used to have, the boy who never smiled and the girl who died so long ago, what was her name he would never say her name and_

"I don't know what the hell is going on with you, but we're getting out of here." Yamada's loud announcement broke the concentration and the tiny narrative fragment and Raiku blinked away the dark spots in her vision, low blood pressure and hysteria or too much Plot set loose all at once and scrambling to find a place to settle.

Thank god for Daisukenojo, she thought, eyeing him and noticing with no small amount of relief that the stories that were trying to find a way in were fragmenting too fast to get a real foothold. He was too steady for it to latch on for long without making some major changes to his character, because as she'd just seen, there were only a couple of ways to make him Plot-interesting and none of them were anything but cliches. And there may have been a lot of Genematrix fodder around, but all of the most potent, the really deadly powerful stuff had gone to—

She shut down the half-formed thought immediately.

Nope. She couldn't think of it as Ryuu. Ryuu was an asshole and a sadist and quite possibly legitimately mentally unstable, but he was still her teammate and sort of her friend, and she couldn't conflate the…  _thing_  there with him. After all, it had to die.

It did.

The room was dark, lit only by a couple of lamps and Yamada's amazingly incandescent rage, which was a blessing. She could feel it in her mind, a pressure against her thoughts, but it wasn't hard to avoid looking at it.

She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth. It staved off the nausea and helped take her mind off that thing, since breathing was only barely an automatic process for her even under normal circumstances.

'It could be beneficial, anyway,' it pointed out.

"Exc-goddamn-use you?" Yamada asked, expression darkening. Well. Darkening even more. Darkest-ing? Bad, it was bad.

'Well. The targets were hiding, so they probably knew we were here. If we have to leave after an accident and we haven't been able to find them, they  _are_  just civilians. They might think we've gone home in disgrace.'

Yamada's dark eyes took on a shrewd gleam, even though Raiku didn't doubt the thought had already occurred to him. Yamada's approach to team leadership was one tiny part actual inclusive strategizing, and one larger part refusing to put forth suggestions so that they had to figure things out on their own. The final overwhelming majority was training and yelling.

So much yelling.

Daisukenojo reluctantly stopped eyeballing Raiku to think about this. 'So, what—we hide in the woods and wait for them to fuck up?'

'There are teams moving through here pretty regularly. We just have to keep an eye on them and the bastards should show up,' it corrected.

'Oh, yeah, cool. Great. But in case you haven't noticed,  _asshat_ ,' Daisukenojo pointed out, voice getting steadily louder until he seemed to actually notice, at which point he dropped down into a terribly conspicuous stage-whisper, 'she is  _freaking out_  over here for  _no goddamn reason_. Not exactly ealthy-stay, ight-ray?'

'I'm pretty sure Pig Latin is still within her ental-may apacity-cay,' it shot back.

Well, that settled it. Ryuu would  _never_  have argued in favour of her mental nything-…ay.

Raiku wasn't sure which was worse: that it had vouched for her, or that it had apparently been wrong to. Why did she always pick words for Pig Latin that started with vowels when she knew it didn't work right?!

"Lie low and wait for them to get cocky. That's your plan?" Yamada asked, face unreadable, arms folded across his chest.

Daisukenojo sighed. 'Well it's not like we have a lot of other options. It's that or fail the mission, so it's at least a chance to salvage shit.'

Yamada frowned, but in that way he tended to when he begrudgingly agreed. Raiku breathed in slowly, letting this idea sink in. Daisukenojo was mostly right, but it was better than a chance, really. With that thing tagging along, events would slide into place with terrible convenience. In addition, it could only be better to not be trapped inside with it, to be left to feel Its awful presence expanding to slide across the walls. At least outside she wouldn't have that problem.

Well. The thing  _itself_  would still be a problem.

Raiku let out her breath just as carefully, absently sliding her hands together.

All she felt was fabric.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, she'd been wrong.

It had only been a matter of time, really; this whole "being correct" thing was only ever a phase.

It was so much worse outside.

Away from the elaborate web of conductors and electricity that even a small village like Iji was made of, Raiku's focus on it only became more and more painfully acute as the rest of her mind seemed to diffuse. The tug and turbulence of energy surrounding her left her grasping tight to her own mind to keep centered and it had been distracting, helped even more by how she could never do it completely. She ended up slightly adrift each time, as though her mind was dissolving into electrical currents at the edges, simultaneously more aware and less focused all at once.

Outside, away from the kind of everything that could pull her into itself, was a nightmare, and it only confirmed what Raiku already knew:

Nature was terrible.

They'd ended up leaving so late that it was early and the dawn was still a way off, leaving them in that dim, grey pre-dawn light, the false morning making the close-knit trees seem to stretch up forever. It was still going to be overcast when the daytime finally got its ass in gear and she knew it would be because it was... It was  _foggy_. And what was fog?! Fog was just slow moving  _water_ particles, not running but sort of…  _lurking_. Fog was water that couldn't suck it up and commit, fog was just clouds that were  _lazy as shit_. Raiku had shocked herself no less than fourteen times in ten minutes and almost burnt off what was left of Yamada's eyebrows twice, practically wading through the dense mist.

 _Nature_.

Gross.

Still, at least it was just sticky and warm instead of sticky and disgustingly sweltering. Little victories. She could almost ignore the tiny black flecks swimming through the haze, narrative energy cast adrift and looking for a place to go.

'I wish I'd had a chance to say goodbye to Taro,' she said with forced cheer, trying to inject some life into her voice, watching her breath disturb the fog in front of her face. 'That guy was alright.'

'Yeah,' Daisukenojo replied. He was half-asleep and it made his voice even thicker, the huskiness of it never failing to sound weird to her. 'He barely laughed that time you skidded off the roof.'

Raiku half-heartedly shoved him. Tragically, he was carrying both her pack and his and additionally weighed  _eighty thousand tonnes_  so he didn't budge, the force of the push instead sending her unexpectedly sideways. Her toes skidded over a tree root, almost sending her into the ground before she caught her balance on a low-hanging branch.

Daisukenojo just rolled his shoulder, clicking his tongue. 'Man. You zapped me,' he said with mock injury, practically batting his static-y eyelashes.

From behind them came a slow clapping.

'Shut up,' she hissed, clutching the branch so tightly she almost felt her bones creak. '…Ryuu,' she added when Daisukenojo looked startled by her vehemence. The name tasted sour, bitter in her mouth, the ghost of battery acid and ionized air. She was going to kill it. She'd find a way to kill it, even if it took  _the rest of her life_  and then it would  _pay_.

"We'll set up camp here," Yamada announced, apropos of nothing. She looked up and caught him eyeing her, expression dark even through the mist.

Aw. He was worried. Raiku beamed back at him, wearily lifting an arm from the branch to wave at him and feeling like a winner when she managed an uncoordinated flop. Half a wave, right there, first try! It was important to give Yamada positive reinforcement whenever he expressed an emotion other than rage or utter disappointment.

…It had been a long night.

'You really think they're just gonna fall for it?' Daisukenojo asked, voice coming from about eight feet higher than she'd expected. She spun around, terrified that he would suddenly be—...up a tree. He was up a tree, already securing the temporary canopy.

Well.

So, he probably wasn't going to become an inhuman giant anytime soon, but she could hardly be blamed for being afraid of that.

'Maybe, maybe not.'

Raiku shuddered at the sound of its almost-voice and tried to hide it by swiftly dropping into a crouch, dragging some kindling together and tugging a glove off, rubbing her fingers together briskly to generate a spark, more out of habit than anything else. Fire probably was a terrible idea, actually, but it wasn't like it really mattered. With that thing hanging around and no plan to get rid of it yet, things would just… fall into place.

'Hey, Raiku.'

She hummed to herself, high and manic and utterly tone-deaf, pretending she hadn't heard.

'Oi, Raiku.'

There was a tap on her shoulder. Raiku slowly turned her head to catch sight of two long, spider-like trails of darkness, roughly the right shape for a stretched, distorted hand, before reluctantly tracing up the length of its arm to look into its eyes.

Darkness was flowing into and out of new, invisible seams in what could have been flesh, flashes of tanned skin here, snatches of black fabric there. It was grotesque, somehow worse than just the darkness. The Plot was… being  _absorbed_ , or being assimilated in his skin and his body, it was becoming more a part of the world and a part of what was left of Ryuu and it was  _wrong_. It was monstrous, and it was still looking at her. 'You alright?'

Raiku managed to crease her eyes in a weak approximation of her usual way of smiling.

Was she alright? Wow. That thing really didn't understand Ryuu at all.

Apparently satisfied with that, it turned away and Ryuu  _never_  did that while she was still making eye contact, always dragged it out until she wanted to gouge her own eyes out. Ryuu never turned away unless he was making a point of it and something about this normal human behaviour from something with his face made some part of her recoil.

She could feel the thought coming. It was explicitly unwelcome, shoving its way to the front of her mind and she shoved it back down with equal vigor, because she just  _knew_  it would be a bad one. Gairano had developed the ability to sense and avoid unwelcome revelations over years of dealing with highly charged teammates. She could hone this skill. She  _could_. She busied herself, dragging her gloves back on and unrolling her bedroll with a deft flick of her wrists, barely bothering to space it her customary two feet away from everyone else.

Maybe if she was lucky, she'd electrocute the thing before she even woke.

Raiku shook her head, sinking onto her bed and discreetly tugging her glove off again under the safety of the covers, rubbing her fingers together just to feel the skin there. Nothing happened; she wasn't even sure why she was doing it. She was just hyperaware of it and she knew that intellectually, but she'd… she'd expected it to be different, in some way. Like there'd be some sign of it, stamped across the pale skin of her palm, lines of contact tracing up her fingers.

Ridiculous. Normal people didn't go around with that kind of history written all over them. Nope. She was being insane. Touching one Plot abomination was not enough to mark her in some way, wasn't the right kind of touch to qualify as anything that meant something.

Which she'd never even wanted! Not her. Touch, the whole field of touch and touch-related things, it all seemed gross. She tried to summon up the memory of some of Mayuko's more graphic diagrams and failed; she'd repressed them pretty well. It was distracting enough that it caught her by surprise, when the thought sneaking around her subconscious hit.

Was Ryuu still in there somewhere?

And god  _damnit_ , there it was. She'd struggled against it for a pathetic one time only and there it was, plain as day. She was so out of practice with the whole "being a person" thing, it was frankly a little disappointing.

It felt weirdly like a knock on her mind, the thought resurfacing against the current of tangent trying to push it out of her brain.

Could Ryuu still be in there?

Raiku had never seen this, outside of Naruto, and for the first time she wondered if there was a person in there under the Character. She had tried so hard not to, but she wondered if the skin she'd felt under her hand was all that was left of Ryuu or if it was a cage now, wrapped in enough Plot that Ryuu was trapped inside beneath it, watching his body act without him, his life lived by someone else.

Raiku suppressed a shudder, her own skin crawling in sympathy, her chest suddenly constricted. Being trapped inside your own body; Raiku was more qualified than most to be deeply, viscerally afraid of that, but for Ryuu, who was stolen from his family, the boy who'd found out his whole life had been decided for him by his genes, before he'd even been born...

Ryuu, who had been so helpless all along and never even known.

No.

She shoved the idea back down, forcing herself to breathe deep and power through the pain in her chest, through the sudden feeling that there wasn't enough air in the world and not enough space for her to fit in it.

No.

It didn't change anything, either way. She knew that.

Her palm itched. Roughly, she dragged her glove back on.


	62. unnecessary subtlety and occam's razor

It was easier, in the light of day, to firm her resolve. It probably had nothing at all to do with how it seemed so much smaller in daylight, how much less expansive it seemed when it wasn't just bleeding into the dark, everywhere and everything all at once.

Nothing at all!

Well, it was also smaller overall now. She could even see skin at the joints and through the inky slashes over its face, where the Plot had assimilated into flesh instead of just resting over it, trying to find a way in. It had already found ways in, and Raiku had been up for half the night filled with crawling, sympathetic horror, sure each time she woke that she'd feel narrative impetus somehow seeping in through scars and the pores of her skin. It was blackness and voices only in patches now, its eyes too yellow and its teeth even sharper, like the few parts of Ryuu left soft around the edges had been rubbed raw .

Raiku paused for a moment, impressed; that nostalgia sure had crept in fast.

After that moment of contemplation, she finished rolling up her bedding and tucked it away, feeling a great deal better about her situation. Sure, she was going to have to kill Ryuu. That was going to happen. And sure, he'd been her friend for quite a while now and only tried to murder her for most of that time, but it wasn't like she really had a choice and it wasn't like it was really Ryuu at all.

The key here would be to remember that.

Behind her, Daisukenojo was making some indignant rebuttal to something the thing had said. Something probably nowhere near as personally crushing as Ryuu would have, Raiku thought loyally, and she dusted her hands off and stood up. 'So! What's the plan?' she asked brightly, turning to face them.

It has its arms folded and didn't bother turning to look at her when it answered. 'Yamada's gone to get some more water and after that we're going to split up and do some recon.'

Split up, Raiku marvelled; was life always this linear for people attached to the Genematrix? Did terrible but dramatic decisions really make themselves so attractive? Were there just neon signs everywhere saying "come get us, dramatic rivals! Maybe talk about some highly traumatic past incident to rile us up for good measure!" But she couldn't help but comment, or it would have gotten suspicious. 'Doesn't that sound… high-risk?'

Daisuke gestured at her. 'See?! Not just me! It's a goddamn terrible idea. Last time we split up, Raiku almost got lynched.'

Well that was hardly fair. Technically accurate, sure, but not… okay, it  _felt_  unfair.

'They're civilians.' It said.

'Civilian criminals,' Daisukenojo countered, narrowing his eyes. 'Who have already killed highly-trained shinobi. Better trained than us, in fact! I don't care if they aren't shinobi,  _people_  can always find ways to hurt other  _people_ , you stupid shit, that's why shinobi exist in the first place!'

Raiku blinked. That had gotten weirdly intense.

It didn't seem to notice the sudden spike of dramatic depth. It probably thought it was normal. Maybe it was now. 'We're just looking around, and you sure as hell didn't have these objections when Yamada agreed!' It was slouching and for a moment she couldn't figure out why that was wrong, because if Ryuu wasn't eventually taken out of commission by one of the many enemies he was going to make, it'd be permanent damage to his lumbar spine from a lifetime of terrible posture. As Daisukenojo almost smacked him in the face from sheer frustration, though, it became more obvious. It was reassuring, oddly, that it was getting Ryuu slightly wrong, because Ryuu didn't slouch as much usually when he was arguing with Daisukenojo. He tended to straighten slightly to use his height to loom, usually just to piss Daisuke off even more, and he wasn't now.

Not Ryuu, she was reminded and sighed happily.

"If you half-sized morons are done?" Yamada asked, pushing his way past some branches and lobbing a full canteen at fake-Ryuu's head.

Raiku frowned. That had been a bit awkward. She was going to have to at least use his name, while at least part of him was still alive in there.

It...  _Ryuu_  caught it effortlessly. 'Yeah, I think we are,' it said, giving Daisukenojo a narrow glare.

Daisukenojo gritted his teeth and caught the follow-up missile from Yamada when he said nothing, tucking the canteen away.

"They filled you in, yeah?" Yamada asked Raiku, giving her a suspicious once-over. She nodded, eyes creased in an expression of mild cheer. "And you're good?"

She nodded again and caught the slightly more gently thrown water bottle when he finally deemed this accurate.

"Good. I want everyone to keep this low profile; we're just familiarizing ourselves with our newer, shittier location, get me? We want the lay of the land so there aren't any more goddamn surprises. I want you idiots to know every rock, tree and potential hiding place within throwing distance, get me?" he demanded.

Raiku paled slightly; they'd used Yamada's throwing range as a unit of distance before. Lesser men could die of exposure if they tried to reach its outer limit without the proper supplies.

"Get me?!" Yamada repeated when no one answered. They replied with a chorus of reluctant noises, which he seemed to think was good enough. "So pick a direction and get moving!"

Daisukenojo and Ryuu immediately turned for the same direction and entered into a corresponding face-off to see who would get it.

Raiku scanned her surroundings more leisurely, secure in the knowledge she could pick whichever way she wanted while they sorted that out. She knew which way they would end up, of course, because of the Plot trail that had sidled up to take over in the night.

She took the time to look directly at it, actually a little relieved to look at one behaving normally, pathetically, instead of taking free will away from people for no reason. It was a long bar of shifting darkness stretching from Ryuu's feet like a second shadow, plunging into the woods. It was twitching and jerking in place roughly, almost thrashing against itself; oddly tetchy, but then again it was probably trying to pull Ryuu towards itself faster, unhappy with the delay. Bizarrely opaque as well, but it didn't seem fully formed yet.

Raiku allowed herself a little smugness. At least everything wasn't going smoothly for it. Daisuke and Ryuu were facing the opposite direction so she deftly stepped over it and followed it into the woods. After a moment she jumped up into the trees, just because it felt like the thing to do. She knew intellectually that she had spent most of her life on the ground, but it just didn't feel like a realshinobi thing to wander around all flat-footed and she felt like a fraud a lot of the time anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

It was a relief to just flit around for a while, leaping from branch to branch through the leaves, static building in her hair from her clothes rubbing against her skin, the thick canopy overhead providing some relief from the growing heat. The Plot below was still active, but she couldn't feel Daisuke or Ryuu anymore, and could only peripherally sense the various metals Yamada kept on his person.

Though when she really focused, there wasn't a lot there. Yamada had barely more than a civilian, and most of what he did carry he largely kept for Raiku's convenience. Wait, without the usual weapons, how did Yamada fight? She'd never really seen him in action… Did he just stare at people until they cried? Wait, he was no Uchiha. That was impossible.

Oh god, the Uchiha. Sometimes, Raiku thought as she pushed aside a particularly leafy branch, she was very grateful that the Gairano didn't have to deal with  _that_  particular wasp's nest anymore. Apparently they'd been both clever and psychotically tenacious, which was pretty standard for shinobi clans; unfortunately, they also took exception to any other clans, potential or otherwise, and gave the Gairano the side-eye for their numbers alone. And only getting worse with each generation. Sasuke's brother what's-his-name had been widely regarded by the Gairano as The Worst for having an overabundance of both of those defining Uchiha qualities, only ousted once Naruto decided to become Hokage and ruined everyone's lives forever.

Thank god that guy had gone crazy before that became an issue, Raiku concluded, being a member of perhaps the only family to regard a massacre as a natural or even inevitable cause of death. You couldn't have two people be The Worst. And it wasn't like one of them would just step down, either; you couldn't expect Characters to be  _polite_.

At the end of this rambling tangent Raiku stopped, crouching on a worryingly spindly branch. It occurred to her that she had, for years now, largely assumed for some reason that Yamada's overwhelming size and strength existed purely to intimidate her and served no practical function at all. How did he fight? That was answered pretty quickly just by looking at him.

Huh. Huh.

God, Raiku. Get it together. She launched from her tiny branch and it splintered behind her, an obvious sign of her presence she would usually be horrified by. But why bother concealing it? Keeping an eye on the Plot far beneath her, Raiku was pretty sure they'd all end up in the same place anyway, though it certainly felt weird to be following one instead of crushing it. But if Ryuu's new consciousness was too strong to be repelled at all by her presence or by an entire history of only sporadic narrative significance on Ryuu's part; she didn't really stand a chance against it by herself.

Not for the first time that morning, Raiku wished her dad was there.

She shook her head, leaving some faint scorch marks on nearby leaves. Her dad wasn't there, so she would just have to buck up. If she couldn't hit it directly, she  _could_  wait for it to fully commit to a narrative line, which it seemed close to doing already. As some random burst of Characterization, it was basically invulnerable. She couldn't stop something until it  _did_  something, so all she had to do was wait until it did, and for it to consequently open itself up to attack.

Gairano tended to call these openings Plot Holes, because they were suckers for terrible, terrible metaphors. Cheesy name aside, it would get the job done.

Raiku slowed her persistent path forward as the Plot below started to fade, already difficult to see in the sun-dappled underbrush. She came to a halt perched as high up as she could, largely obscured by leaves even shifting in the wind. Taking a breath and concentrating, she tried to figure out what it was up to. She couldn't feel any large quantities of metal ahead, so presumably the criminals weren't nearby. She couldn't smell smoke, or feel any storms incoming, nothing to indicate the kind of natural happenings that had taken out the other teams. After shifting around on the branch and peering through the leaves, she concluded that she couldn't and hadn't seen any obvious signs of recent traffic. Even her limited chakra senses were drawing a blank, but that was fairly standard. Overall, the Plot seemed to be taking Ryuu somewhere where nothing had happened yet, indicating that his presence would be the trigger for some event rather than a participant in an existing one.

Raiku traded her crouch for a cross-legged position, settling in to lean against the tree trunk and allowing herself some space and time to think. And to get some much-needed vitamin D, but that was a side-benefit.

The thing was that Raiku had grown up reading terrible, terrible books. She'd tried to lobby for some better ones once she'd realized that, but the Gairano family were universally raised on the greatest clichés of fiction simply because that was what they would all come to expect. An awful novel was an invaluable tool for any Gairano in their quest to understand the total lunacy that could and would happen in their everyday lives, so subtlety was just a waste of time. Subtlety hadn't been a necessary part of their education for generations.

So, she mused, absently rubbing her palm with her other hand; which tropes would Ryuu get?

Obviously a romance was out, unless the Genematrix could drag one up for him at the last second. She was the only nearby female and while a teammate would ordinarily be perfect, she was hardly going to get trapped and it didn't have enough time for that build-up anyway, not at the rate it was going. Ryuu didn't have any ex-girlfriends for it to summon, or any lost loves, so another route gone. Additionally, it wasn't overcast and it wasn't as horrifyingly hot that day, so the standard rain-drenched-aesthetic or heat-induced-stripping tropes were out of the sexy ballpark.

God. She shuddered. Ryuu had no place in any kind of sporting arena, let alone that one. There he could really have done some damage.

Back to the topic at hand! Ryuu did have all the earmarks of a tragic protagonist, but then again, most Characters did and tragedies were generally pretty easy to spot.

Yes, Raiku thought, deliberately not thinking of someone now long-dead; tragedies were fairly easy to identify. It hadn't given off those kinds of noises either. Tragedies tended to be quieter than the others, anyway. They tended to be intensely personal, internal things, not the ostentatious creature Ryuu had been smothered by.

She spared a thought for some sort of comedy, but no, that didn't fit Ryuu at all. Ryuu was a Drama magnet and always had been. A comedy would just ruin that potential and the Genematrix would want to drag as much use out of his history as it could get.

So a familial drama it would be, goddamn. Raiku worried at the fingertip of her glove with equally covered teeth, just for something to chew on that wasn't her growing anxiety. It was always going to be a family thing with Ryuu, but surely it wasn't too much to hope that it would just be a personal arc where he discovered some… god, some family tombstone and felt a sense of closure?

In the distance, Raiku felt Ryuu's familiar abundance of metal wander into range.

Of course it was.

Raiku sighed and allowed herself to slide sideways off her perch, neatly catching herself on her hands on a lower branch and propelling herself into another jump.

She had to get moving anyway. Yamada would come and yell at her if he sensed her staying in one place for too long. It didn't take long for it to catch up; she hadn't been putting up much of a fight, mostly investigating what had seemed like a rabbit-hole that had ended up belonging to some sort of terrified mole creature, replaying past conversations with trees so that she actually had the upper hand socially for once... Normal stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

'You having fun frolicking around?' Ryuu asked her when their paths eventually crossed.

Raiku huffed indignantly, hanging upside-down from a branch by her bent legs where she had been pretending for a moment that gravity was responsible for the direction her hair stuck up in. She folded her arms.

She wasn't… she wasn't  _frolicking_ _._  Raiku was an electrokinetic mastermind with a surprisingly flexible moral outlook on murder, okay, she didn't  _frolic_.

Harmless thoughts. Harmless thoughts. She pulled herself to sit upright and looked down at him. 'Aren't you supposed to be somewhere else?' she asked.

It shrugged with one oil-streaked shoulder, the gesture achingly familiar. 'We're all covering the same ground anyway. Overlaps are bound to happen.'

Raiku frowned. 'Yeah... I don't think they're meant to happen on purpose.'

It looked at nothing in particular for a while, noteworthy only because it wasn't looking anywhere near her. '… We were talking, yesterday,' it said eventually.

Raiku tilted her head. This was familiar. It was, she realized after a moment of confusion, an almost exact replica of the circumstances of a very recent conversation. The Genematrix sure was hitting the parallels  _hard_  for this one. Her in a tree, him… lower down in a tree as the seemingly reluctant participant, the first breeze in days rifling through their hair. Almost exactly the same, right down to the sun playing over his face.

But, she reflected, his face had belonged to him then. It could never have really been the same at all.

It was looking at her expectantly. Raiku quickly tried to recall what it had last said. Something about mirroring past events of Ryuu's actual life to try and get a feel for how best to mask how it had stripped him of autonomy and left him a vessel for his most dramatic Character traits? No, that probably wasn't it.

'We were talking!' she agreed eventually. 'We talk pretty regularly.' She made a vague gesture with her hands that could have referred to a balance in a more abstract universe. 'It's… a thing that happens!'

It continued just looking at her. 'Yeah,' it agreed, 'and yesterday we were talking about something in particular.'

Raiku swung her legs just to have something to do.

Well. It may not have been as direct as Ryuu, but… it was still making itself pretty clear. 'I don't really know what you want from me,' she said helplessly. 'I mean… you said your family wasn't going to contact you and you were right,' had been wrong, they would probably crash in any second now, 'so I was wrong! I am sorry! Sorry to have said that…?'

'Big surprise. Why did you even think they would?' it asked bluntly.

Oh fuck no. Raiku took a slow, carefully breath. She was being used for, for some sort of clumsy attempt at foreshadowing! Foreshadowing right before something happened! God, what kind of lazy, uninspired Plot would even—

'I didn't think they would, necessarily,' she corrected slowly, unable to help herself because there was trashy and then there was  _lazy_. 'I thought you might be reminded of it because we're in a sort of adjacent region to where it happened and I wanted to see if you were okay, but I didn't… I mean, I don't know them! Never really, uh, talked to them, except for how I…' She broke off with a wince. Put a foot through that one guy's charred corpse.

After … charring and turning him into that corpse.

And probably disintegrating a fair percentage of the others. Wow. They had both sort of dropped the ball by never bringing how she'd accidentally killed a bunch of his biological family. That should probably have been discussed. 'Was there for that whole thing,' she said instead. 'So I have no idea! They could all have died.'

Awkward silence. The leaves rustled around them in the gentle breeze Ryuu had presumably stirred up for his own comfort after weeks of still, hot air.

She coughed. 'Which. I am sorry. About.' She widened her eyes to try and look sincere, or at least helpless enough to skate by. She was absolutely not sorry just because it wouldn't have happened if they hadn't attacked them first. Don't start something you can't finish, to paraphrase every shinobi teacher she'd ever had.

This oddly seemed to satisfy it. 'Well, I'm fine.'

Raiku creased her eyes to fake the smile because it wasn't fine, it wasn't fine that it had done this and it wasn't fine that it was making her go along with it.

'Good,' she said instead of that, of any of that, instead of telling it that it wasn't Ryuu and she wasn't going to forgive it for that. It wasn't like she could address it directly, anyway. It was a force of causality, not a person, and you couldn't talk to a Narrative, tell it plainly that combining dramatic traits and a backstory didn't make a person, that the little details and quirks and bad habits it thought were extraneous were more important than any checklist of baggage.

She couldn't talk to a Character. There was just Exposition and Foreshadowing and Development and suddenly she missed Ryuu, really missed him in that way she'd just have to get used to.

It nodded firmly. 'Good,' it repeated, at least mustering enough of Ryuu's menace to tell her clearly that the conversation was finished and not going to happen again.

'Good?' she offered warily, just because awkward was what was appropriate here. With that out of the way, they just had to wait there until whoever was coming showed up.

It tilted its head and narrowed its eyes, opening its mouth to speak before a sudden, convenient spike of chakra shot up from the direction of the campsite. Raiku shot to her feet and pushed away, confident the thing would follow her. Wow. Right when the conversation ended. Way to spoon-feed it, she thought with no small amount of literary snobbery.

Maybe there would be less senseless massacre this time, Raiku hoped, ever the optimist.

 

 

 

 

 

Drawing closer, there wasn't the battle she had expected to find. Daisuke intercepted them shortly before they made it back, waving them over to his perch halfway up a tree that was implausibly able to conceal Yamada as well.

Raiku scrambled up, Ryuu just behind. 'What's going on?' she asked, only to be immediately shushed.

'We've got some people in the camp,' Daisukenojo whispered, a branch lower than Yamada and so defying all natural laws. 'Nine of them, armed.'

'Shinobi?' Ryuu asked, its voice lowered as well. Raiku barely avoided rolling her eyes. Of course they were, because they'd collapsed their site and without the usual signs of a campsite, there was no way that civilians would be able to—

Yamada shook his head. 'Civilians.'

Raiku's eyebrows shot up. 'What? No!' she hissed, more to the narrative weave of the universe than anything else because  _come on_. 'How did they find us, huh?! We hid that campsite! Yamada hid that campsite, there is no way they found it on their own!' Being this outraged this quietly was confusingly contradictory, but she forged ahead. 'One of them has to be a shinobi in disguise or something!' There, she was giving it a way out, damnit, she was giving it a way to make sense that it had to take!

Yamada shook his head, jaw tense but expression oddly calm. Apparently not. "Not a one," he said slowly, obviously preoccupied with the same issue.

Raiku settled into a low, annoyed growl. That made no sense. That made n _o sense_ , it was just—

Well. It hadn't caught up yet, still stretched into the woods; apparently this one was trying to conserve energy.

What an  _asshole_.

'They feel like civilians,' Ryuu agreed. 'But she's right. How did they find it?'

'I'm more worried about what they're doing,' Daisukenojo said, gazed turned inward. Probably using the chakra senses that he had and was capable of using, like all good shinobi.

Raiku fumed.

'They're just waiting around.'

'For who?' Raiku asked, idiotically, totally deserving the looks sent her way. 'No way it's for us,' she said flatly. 'Nope. We're not going to get… get ambushed by people when we know exactly where and how many there are. They can't think that'll work.'

Really, she asked the universe at large; really? This was Ryuu's Plot as a Character? Despite herself, she was a little offended on his behalf. This wasn't worth losing his identity over. She cast a quick look through the branches to the forest floor, but couldn't see the little shit to give it a proper glare.

Wait, Yamada had been concerned that these guys had back-up from another source. That would probably have been where Ryuu's family came in. She relaxed a little; sure, she wasn't going to let it get that far, but at least Ryuu's destruction was being paid some respect.

"We're here to take 'em out, so that's what we're doing," Yamada said, folding his arms. "But I don't like this, get me?"

'I could just kill them,' Raiku pointed out when no one else seemed to remember the fact that surprise mass-murder was something of a natural specialty of hers. 'I mean, you guys clear out, I stay here, I go boom and we all go home.'

Yamada raised his non-brows. She shrank back slightly, feeling self-conscious. 'Well I could,' she muttered.

Daisukenojo frowned. 'I don't think starting a massive fire would be good here.'

'I can do it without starting a—one time, you traitor,  _one time_ , you know nothing about conduc—'

"Can you?" Yamada asked directly.

A little off-balance from the interruption but utterly confident for once, Raiku nodded. 'Yep.'

He seemed pleased by this, settling back against the tree to consider it.

And then, 'but it's a trap, and they've already used it to take out ANBU.' Goddamn Ryuu. At least it had his habit of ruining her plans down, wonderful. 'Where are the random disasters and coincidences that took out the others?'

Raiku eyeballed it. 'I don't think a thunderstorm would help them here,  _Ryuu_ ,' she whispered sarcastically.

It smirked. 'A landslide would,  _Gairano_ _._ '

Oh, that was so low and  _so very incorrect_. 'Shame there's no mountain here,  _last name omitted_. Use your brain!' Oh god that felt so good to say for once.

Ryuu narrowed its eyes into slits. 'What did you just—'

"He's got a point," Yamada decided, dropping the hammer on their argument because they were talking about how to murder some people waiting nearby, way to be professional. "New plan. Nab and stab, just like we practised. We all clear on our part?"

Raiku wasn't sulking because her attempt to mildly inconvenience the Plot had failed. She wasn't. 'Yes,' she grumbled.

"Good. You and Sullen take quadrants one and three, Shorty can take four. I'll be on two, everyone pull back to the emergency rendezvous point the second something suspicious happens or I give the signal, get me?" Yamada asked, meeting each of their eyes in turn to make sure they were listening. "The  _second_."

When they had all agreed emphatically enough for his satisfaction and repeated it, individually, he seemed satisfied. "Get going."

Despite the name, Raiku's part of the nab and stab had less to do with nabbing or stabbing and more to do with taking her clothes off.

Wait.

That sounded terrible.

She mused on this unfortunate fact as she darted through the branches to the west-most point of the raggedy ambush circle, eventually landing silently on a branch high above one of the men apparently killing Konoha-nin.

After a moment of concentration, she slid further along and saw another. Two were in her killzone. One was far below and would have struggled to see her; he was crouching almost directly beneath her tree and was largely hidden by bushes, while the other seemed to have made use of a rotting, fallen tree to hide himself and was potentially a visibility threat.

Not bad, she had to admit. An inky patch of Plot wobbled at her threateningly where it was sliding into view on the ground below, obviously an offshoot from Ryuu's that would try and draw the fight out to make it as dramatic as possible.

She would have to deal with that shortly, but first things first. Only a moment's observation made it obvious that the men hadn't bothered to keep within visual range of each other; the one in the shrub was far further back, concealed from all angles but above, on lower ground and additionally, possibly not even aware of where the other was at all. When the wind rose and the leaves began to rustle she leapt down to near ground-level. She exhaled carefully.

There was no sign from the others to stop and she had a few seconds on their timeline- excellent! She flexed her fingers, casting her gaze towards the Plot pooling through the underbrush. She gripped the branch she'd been standing on, checking to make sure the width of the trunk kept her sufficiently hidden from both parties before shifting her weight. Below her it started to shrink away, which, rude. She dropped down to her hands and then to the ground, silently hitting the Plot feet-first and just as quickly pressing herself back against the tree. For a while she remained still, listening, but when the men ahead failed to react and the Plot predictably started to shrink, eventually vanishing from her senses altogether, Raiku felt she'd safely and justifiably abbreviated that fight scene.

She heard one of the criminals spit on the ground and shift in place.

He spat.

Raiku gaped in silent indignation, only the copious metal she could feel on him stopping her from blowing her cover and picking a fight right then. They couldn't even be bothered trying to hide themselves? What, winning before meant they'd be easy to pick off? There was Plot and then there was  _insulting,_  there was no need to—

There was a drop in the wind, the plan having taken off already and Raiku panicked, immediately ripping her gloves off and leaping forward onto the back on the hidden man closest to her, one bare hand clapping to his bare forehead, shoving his head down to keep his jaw closed, and the other coming to clamp down below his breastbone.

He convulsed so violently she was almost thrown away, the bush rustling too loudly for a moment before she shifted to compensate, head aching from how tightly she had clenched her jaw with sympathetic tension as a muffled sound of agony tried to escape from between his teeth, current running from one hand into him and then back to her through the other. Hands clamped onto him hard through the spasms, she relaxed only when she could smell burning flesh, when the muscles of his spine were twitching and jerking at random, when the only electricity in him was hers and then none at all. She lowered him carefully to the ground and crouched above him, the occasional residual spasm threatening to unbalance her as she gauged distance.

Raiku took a breath and let it out slowly through her mouth, flexing suddenly twitchy fingers. She dropped her shoulders, realigning her body and then leapt up, catching and swinging over a branch above and pushing herself off to land and roll behind her remaining target. He was already turning by the time she was upright and he reached for something—probably a knife, but nothing she wanted to know about—and she lunged forward, negligible bodyweight still too much for him to keep his balance with that kind of momentum, sending the two of them crashing into the log he'd been hiding behind.

He smelt musty, she noticed in some distant, quiet part of her brain, almost like the dead leaves they were pressed to and then she had a bare hand on his throat and she could see light beneath his skin where it was surging out from hers and he was choking in silence, his muscles were locking and his legs were jerking, meaty spasms where she had them trapped under her bony knees.

Raiku noticed that her pants were scorched there only when she pushed away from him at last, leaving him slumped and twitching, eyes staring at nothing and she took a few deep breaths to clear her nose of the smell of burnt flesh, feeling suddenly that she desperately needed fresh air.

A minute passed, and then another, before Yamada's familiar voice broke the relative peace. "Head count!"

'Two!' she yelled, rising from her crouch and cupping her hands around her mouth.

'Three!' She thought she heard in a distant yell from Daisukenojo.

'One!' Ryuu, closer by.

"Two! Get back here, all of you!"

Raiku tensed and darted around the log, beelining for Yamada immediately. That only made eight, that only made eight, how the hell could they have missed one? She couldn't sense anyone besides the other three, had one escaped?

She had a knife in hand and drew next to Yamada poised to move again, but he seemed relaxed. A man was lying unconscious behind him, face hidden in the dirt but arm twisted brutally to the side. "Good work," Yamada said, instead of telling them  _what the hell was going on._

'Where's guy number nine?' Raiku demanded, unwilling to relax.

Yamada glanced at her, but didn't seem concerned. "There were eight, Speedy, try to pay attention."

Raiku gaped, almost dropping the knife in shock. 'No, there were nine! Daisuke clearly said nine! Daisuke!' she appealed to him where he as emerging from some bushes, rolling his shoulder to stretch it. He shook his head.

'Nope. Eight.'

Raiku tucked her knife away before she scratched her head, luckily in that order after That One Time after That One Training Session.

She… she had heard him, hadn't she? Oh god, were there meant to be nine? Raiku glanced around desperately at the ground they were standing on, but the Plot she'd crushed hadn't had any impact on the one still surrounding Ryuu's feet, so at least she hadn't screwed up there. Maybe it… had tried to extend the fight by adding another person?

No, people were pretty easy to kill in situations like this. That made no sense. Unless…

… Okay, so maybe she hadn't been paying that much attention.

Ever a fan of Occam's Razor, Raiku could accept that her (understandable) lack of focus was the simplest answer here. And hey, it wasn't like she didn't have a lot on her mind! She relaxed, dusting her hands off and slipping her gloves back on. 'Alright! Then that was nowhere near as hard as they made it sound!'

Yamada jerked his thumb at the guy lying on the ground behind him. "Agreed." He sounded less happy about it than Raiku. "I'm going to ask this guy a couple of questions to make sure, get me?" He nodded at Ryuu. "Wake him up."

It rolled its eyes and crouched beside the man, rolling him over and doing something mysteriously medical while Raiku sidled over to check on Daisukenojo. 'How'd your stabbing go?' she asked brightly.

'You are always weirdly cheerful when you kill people, have you noticed that?' he asked, eyeing her suspiciously.

Raiku gasped. 'Excuse me! Here I am, just trying to check on my teammate and you go and accuse me of being some sort of… murder-enjoying psychopath—'

'Who said psychopath? You jumped there all on your own! And so quickly, too,' he mused, but Daisukenojo had a terrible poker face and was already struggling not to grin.

Raiku frowned at him, making sure to exaggerate her angry eyebrows above the mask just so it was clear. She elbowed him in the side. 'You dick.'

'Primadonna,' he shot back, entirely unaware of how devastating an insult that was for a Gairano. To ease her wounded soul, Raiku was going to have to fill his bed with glitter when they got home. Which was looking… reasonably soon? She double-checked the Plot at Ryuu's feet, but it just stretched back into the woods, back towards where they'd been earlier. Unhelpfully.

God. Raiku wasn't a Plot expert, was the thing. She could get impressions off the particularly noisy ones, she could sort of see the gist of most of them, but she couldn't- she couldn't really interact with them like her dad could. She couldn't just look at them, tilt her head a bit and suddenly know everything about them. And the thing was that he was the head of the family for a reason; he was better at it than anybody else, it wasn't reasonable to expect to be able to do the same, but at times like this, it sucked particularly hard he hadn't passed on that genetic advantage when he'd decided to procreate.

Rude.

'He's waking up,' Ryuu said shortly, getting up and stepping away from the man on the ground. Raiku peered down at him. He was heavy-set, had a few surprisingly well-kept weapons on him. Probably stolen from the previous targets. She'd put him at… mid-forties? Faces were hard. Ages, expressions—all of it. It certainly didn't help that this guy looked like he had a shattered cheekbone.

'What did you do to him?' she asked Yamada, trying to understand the complicated injury on the man's chest. 'It looks like he got into a fight with a… weirdly particular bear!'

Yamada didn't answer. Instead he dropped into a crouch by the man's torso and snapped his fingers in front of his face.

Oh god. Was this the torture part?

Raiku's breath started to come a little quicker. Weren't they too young for torture? Well no, not really, shinobi villages had weaponized children for generations and they'd always ended up torturing people, but she felt too young for torture! She didn't have the emotional maturity for torture! Sure, she had the physical knack for causing huge amounts of pain, which she'd spent a fair bit of time on during that stupid time-skip, but this wasn't—

'I'll talk!' the man wheezed the second his eyes managed to focus on Yamada. Part of Yamada. He looked and sounded terrified, probably because he'd actually realized he could only look at Yamada one part at a time due to the sad limitations of human eyes when faced with that much person to take in all at once. Raiku could relate. 'I'll tell you anything!'

Raiku blinked and exchanged a look with Daisukenojo. 'No torture… after all?' she said tentatively. Daisukenojo shrugged helplessly. At the word "torture", the man released a sort of terrified, croaky wail that devolved into painful coughing halfway through.

She'd made noises like that. Raiku suddenly empathized with this man more than was perhaps appropriate. She'd have to watch for that.

'You punched him in the throat,' Ryuu criticized, looking over at Yamada like an idiot criticizing someone unbelievably terrifying. Or exactly that, no simile needed. 'You should've killed him and saved one less… punched in the throat. He has more bruised mulch than larynx left.'

Yamada ignored him but Raiku refused to believe he'd just gloss over that kind of insubordination. There would be a reckoning later. "Who are you working with?" he asked, already deep voice somehow more gravelly than usual.

The man tried to gesture in some way, but his hands just sort of twitched. Raiku had a sneaking suspicion Yamada had gotten him somewhere in the spine, as he'd always shown a preference for spinal attacks. Consequently, Team Yamada had long been known as "those spine-punching assholes," among other equally flattering monikers.

But she was getting distracted. 'It's just us,' the man rasped.

Yamada was, fittingly, as unmoving as a mountain. "How did you find us?"

'We looked around?' the man tried, looking bemused. As bemused as a man could be with probable spinal damage and Yamada crouching over him. 'Then,' he swallowed painfully, 'we waited.'

Yamada was silent for a long time. Then: "you three."

They snapped to attention. Raiku snapped to attention. The others looked over. "Go get some water."

Daisukenojo fished out a largely full canteen. 'But we already—'

"Go. Get some water," Yamada repeated slowly and deliberately. "Get me?"

'We get you! We so get you,' Raiku assured him, grabbing Daisukenojo's arm and almost Ryuu's by reflex and ending up almost hurling herself away from it instead, then determinedly steering around it with Daisukenojo by the arm.

'What do you think he's going to do?' Daisukenojo asked when she'd dragged him for ten minutes and through two bushes she could easily have gone around were she less panicked.

'Why wouldn't he let us stay?' Ryuu added shrewdly. 'It's not like we don't need to know how to do that stuff, and we're not exactly new to violence.'

'Okay, first off? "Let us"—no, no, actually, I don't care!' Raiku said shrilly. 'He's obviously going to hurt him and then kill him, so like you said, we know how to hurt people and we don't need to hang around.'

'Well that isn't—'

'And if that isn't the kind of hurt you meant then he has no reason to let us stick around because we aren't familiar with it and we haven't been trained so he can choose whether or not to introduce us to it now!' Raiku let out in one hasty breath, aware she was talking too fast, too high-pitched and not caring at all. Torture was a new line for her, one she wasn't willing to cross just yet. She would have to eventually, especially given—but not thinking about that! Nope.

Daisukenojo shook free when her path threatened to drag him through another thicket, digging his heels in. 'Okay, okay, I'm coming!' he told her when she spun around, his hands raised. 'But stop dragging me!'

Away from the clearing, the man, Yamada and their merry ring of corpses, Raiku relaxed a little. Daisukenojo grew less tense as well as she watched, obviously feeding off her mood like a tiny, unusually empathetic sponge. Not a great quality for your average shinobi to have, but a work-life balance was important? Maybe?

Wait, who cared?

Raiku shook her head, trying to clear some of the fog. It was impossible to concentrate. After yesterday, and having so little sleep, and trying to keep the Plots straight in her head… she wasn't hearing things properly, she'd almost missed her timing with the nab and stab… She sighed, rubbing the back of her neck. So much for a boring mission. God, had she resented being bored? What an idiot she'd been. She owed herself a good smack in the head, but that could wait until she had some privacy. No point being thought a masochist in addition to a secretive weirdo.

'You look just like Kakashi when you do that,' Ryuu told her on its way past, deliberately pushing her with its shoulder and either ignoring or not noticing her full-body shudder because gross. Even normal Ryuu gave her a wide-berth ordinarily.

'Holy shit, he's right!' Daisukenojo crowed, ducking past her as well. 'You even have the same outfit! Nice catch!'

'E-excuse me?! What did you say?!' Raiku demanded, dropping her hand from her neck like one or either was on fire. She spun around, only to see their retreating backs. 'Hey! Get back here! Take it back!'

She fell into a jog to try and catch up, even her exhausted, emotionally drained brain unable to accept this. 'You two! Don't ignore me!'

For a moment let herself get swept up in her indignation, just enough to ignore the Plot stretching out in front of them.


	63. no one here is a meterologist

Their hostage was dead by the time they got back. Raiku hovered at the edge of the clearing, reluctant to move forward after she'd seen him crumpled there, unsure why he seemed so much… deader than the others. He wasn't torn to pieces or, unlike some of his cohort, burnt to a crisp. He was just lying there on his side, the breeze ruffling his hair against a motionless head, all of him so still. He was no more murdered so than the rest; he even looked less injured. There were only small bursts of blood against his skin and the wound on his chest she'd seen before. The blood splashes made his clothes stick stiffly where they dried, where they weren't still sticking wet and red.

Yamada's hands were very clean. She couldn't stop looking at them.

"He stuck to it," Yamada confirmed for them. "But I still don't like it. Something stinks."

'Maybe you couldn't get it out of him,' Ryuu pointed out, its hands in its pockets.

Yamada looked at them and as a group, the three Chuunin suddenly felt, instinctively, that was somehow not what had happened.

'Ye-eah,' Raiku drew out, 'I don't think that… is likely. But what if he just didn't have all the information?' She, admittedly, was coming from a place where she would always know something that everybody else didn't, but it still seemed a reasonable conclusion.

Yamada nodded. "Exactly."

'So what are we meant to do?' Daisukenojo asked. 'Any sign of where they came from?'

Yamada grimaced with impossible efficiency. Confused birds for miles would feel that same level of foreboding it evoked in Raiku, possibly disrupting the ecosystem for generations. "Yeah."

Raiku shifted nervously. 'Why do I get the feeling we won't like this?' she asked slowly, because the Plot may have been expediting things but there was a  _reason_  Gairano hated them so much.

"Rivers," Yamada informed them. "But they've come through Iji, and recently, get me?"

Raiku paled. 'Not Tadano!' She wasn't sure why she was so convinced about that. He had laughed hysterically when she fell of the roof that one time, and then the one time after that. But he hadn't been malicious or resentful; he'd just been a guy with unruly customers and why the hell would the Plot feel free to just incriminate the people of Iji without caring at all about-

That was a stupid train of thought, she recognised far later than she should have. The Plot would do whatever it wanted and she could get as angry as she wanted, but it wouldn't change anything.

'Who the fuck cares about that; ANBU moved through there the same time we were, and they sure as hell would have noticed something was up,' Ryuu argued, folding its arms and clearly forgetting Yamada had been ANBU for more of his life than he hadn't.

Yamada rolled his eyes. Sort of, he wasn't that mobile in facial expressions. "ANBU on a mission tend to get tunnel vision and they were en route, get me? We could have screamed 'grand larceny' from the roof and they'd have said 'your problem' and pissed off. Their jobs are a hell of a lot more time-sensitive than ours."

'That doesn't seem very team-oriented,' Raiku criticised, because there was efficient and then there was inconsiderate.

Yamada ignored this observation. "These clowns came from somewhere in Rivers, tracked some teams through Iji and wound up here, picking us off. So if they've been through Iji then either we missed something or a whole bunch of people have lied to us, get me? And I'd like to think I'm not that goddamn old yet that my eyes are going."

'How old  _are_  you?' Daisukenojo asked, eyeing him because actually, now that Raiku thought about it, how old  _was_ Yamada?

Yamada heroically ignored this too, but a muscle in his jaw was starting to twitch and he couldn't keep it up forever.

'So do we go back there and… what, try again?' Raiku asked dubiously. 'I mean, it's not like there could be many left.' Drawing attention to their environs, which was the say, their little group of merry corpses.

'What if this was just part of the group? We still don't understand how they even found us,' Ryuu pointed out, casting a bored look her way with its stolen eyes. Raiku flicked her fingers carelessly, trying desperately to channel some flippancy. The resulting  _bang!_  made her skitter a few steps in the opposite direction, fingers burning hot.

"But that's not the goddamn point here!" Yamada snapped, and suddenly she felt far more certain of where they all stood. "We got lied to by villagers inside our own Nation. That's not just dangerous- it's goddamn embarrassing, get me?"

Raiku nodded, looking down at her feet and kicking at the ground slightly. This was that one  _very understandable_  and  _very minor_  total devastation of the countryside from her Genin days all over again.

Yamada snorted. "Yeah, we should all be goddamn ashamed of ourselves. Not good enough, get me?"

'So what do we do?!' Raiku burst out, trying to gesture with her hands tucked safely into her armpits again- she could feel a warning hum in the fine bones of her wrists and hands, and that would likely end badly for one of them. And if history was any indicator, that one of them would be Daisukenojo. 'What's good enough?!'

Yamada raised his non-brows at her. Raiku kept her own raised challengingly, even as the rest of her shrunk back."It's a moot point," he said eventually, when she'd shrunk far enough away that he felt her appropriately apologetic. "Our job was to get rid of them, and we've confirmed this was all of them in at least this group. We go back to camp, send back our report and if they recall us or send new orders, we go from there, get me?"

'But you said something stinks!' Raiku protested. 'Something that is obviously connected to and a part of the job!'

Yamada shook his head. "No, Speedy, our job was to kill the gang, and now we've found something more serious. Any bigger systemic problems around our intel in the area are a different thing. A whole different kettle of fish, get me?"

Daisukenojo and Raiku exchanged uneasy looks. 'But we're not done,' Daisuke pointed out. 'And we're already here.'

Yamada looked unimpressed. "Oh, so being in the neighbourhood decides which jobs we get, huh?"

'It'd be efficient,' Ryuu said, after this left them in silence for a few seconds.

"Yeah, but training a new squad of replacements when we get murdered for not looking before we leap is probably less efficient, get me?" Yamada replied. "Plus, we get picked off and what, Konoha just scratches its head and sends another squad because we didn't tell anyone what we goddamn found? They're just out of the loop and keep up that revolving door of death, huh?"

Raiku blinked. That did make a certain kind of sense. They certainly were in the process of leaping to the next thing.

Wait. Since when did Raiku ever volunteer for more dangerous work?

Something stirred the hairs on the back of her neck just as something shuddered through what Plot she could see on Ryuu. Raiku tensed, immediately tuning out of the conversation and throwing her senses wider. Her stomach churned; what the hell was this thing up to? It wasn't behaving normally, though her frame of reference was admittedly for Plots rather than… whatever the hell this thing had turned into.

She couldn't detect any metal, or any unusual conductors nearby. No one was approaching or if they were, they weren't conventionally armed. She couldn't detect any chakra signatures and even if she could, Daisukenojo would have picked it up ages ago. Ryuu was behaving itself for now.

She frowned. The initial tremor- could it just have been the Genematrix settling on a new course? She looked around their feet, casting a quick glance at the roots of the trees they stood amongst, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

She tried to let her shoulders relax, suddenly aware that she'd stiffened up and started looking around suspiciously and it was only their preoccupation that had stopped her teammates from noticing, but it still felt off. The tension building in her stomach hadn't dissipated; in fact, it felt like her anxiety was only building.

Raiku drummed her fingers on her leg, trying not to shift too obviously. What the hell was it up to? Oh god; was it going to multiply? The knot in her stomach seemed to twist and she took a deep breath that didn't help.

"Either way. We're returning to the nearest outpost to send back an update," Yamada said, jerking his head in some random direction. "This is part of a strategic border zone and it's too sensitive for us to screw around here without updating Konoha on what we've found, get me? We'll do one more body-check and go."

The three junior teammates set about gathering their things and trying to erase the most obvious signs of their presence. Not the bodies; those would be left behind. Anyone worth their salt would know what had happened anyway, so all they could do was conceal who had done it.

Not, Raiku thought sourly, that it wasn't obvious once whoever would find them found out about her little display at Iji and put that and two electrocuted corpses together. Plus, checking the bodies was not her favourite part of this whole gig.

Another deep, calming breath. Boy, that really did nothing! Also, she found upon a quick check of the area, she hadn't really left much, so she couldn't even drag it out to put off body-searching.

Wait. That was because Daisukenojo tended to accumulate her belongings out of habit, even when they weren't doing long treks. She straightened and padded over to where he was crouching by one of the bodies with his back to her, taking advantage of the convenient pose to start casually rifling through his pack.

'You mind?' he asked flatly, no doubt feeling her liberate her tiny cooking pot from his neatly organised pack.

'You don't have to carry my things all the time, Daisuke,' she replied, shoving it into her more haphazardly packed bag. 'I'm stronger now! And also much bigger than you. So much bigger than you.'

'I could snap you like a twig.'

'That's true,' she admitted, but he hadn't really put much feeling into it. 'You alright in there?' she asked, leaning around to try and see his face, just in time to see him reach out and close the dead man's eyes.

Raiku blinked. 'Oh.'

'Yeah, oh,' he said gruffly, dusting his hands off on his pants and getting up. 'Excuse me for not wanting to be left like that,' he finished, turning to face her with an unusually grave expression.

Raiku stared at him. 'Well… you have a death seal,' she said eventually. 'So your body should. Disintegrate. Or, uh, explode, as the case may be.' Not something she'd ever have to worry about researching, but she'd sat through the same quiet talk that all of them had when the war with Sand had started, and it had never become less relevant after that. It should have been worrying, the strange serenity she felt when she remembered that she'd probably take out a square kilometre and whoever had gotten her first, she reflected even as the warm, peaceful reminder of that knowledge settled somewhere above the knot of her anxiety and Daisukenojo glared at her. 'They had to die,' he told her sternly, 'but they were still people.'

Raiku looked down, adopting a shamed expression. She was ashamed, she told herself firmly. She had been shamed and she felt bad now. Daisukenojo huffed and walked over to a man lying half-turned onto his stomach, the skin above his neck mottled grey and blue. Ryuu's, then.

'Sentimental,' Ryuu criticised from too close by. But that was any distance at all, so Raiku had to try not to shift away from someone standing over two metres to her left.

'Not sentimental,' Raiku corrected, sticking her hands in her pockets. 'Respectful.'

Ryuu scoffed quietly, but changed the subject. 'Are you ready?'

Raiku turned towards it and looked at the ground at its feet instead of its face, shrugging. 'I've still gotta check mine.' The Plot still stretched towards the forest, back the way they'd came. It wasn't any bigger, or any more obviously complex. Maybe it had just been reacting to her fail-field? Throwing a little mini-tantrum because she'd stopped it from drawing out the fight?

… Which, given they were civilian criminals, it would have had to have done by throwing something Dramatic out there. Damnit, damnit,  _damnit_ , how could she have been so stupid?! Raiku didn't bother taking another deep breath- clearly breathing was overrated and she'd already suspected as much. It was probably the missing link between here and where they'd been in the forest and how was she so terrible at this so suddenly? This was not her area. It really, really wasn't.

Her stomach gave up on anxious gurgle-cramping and turned to outright pain and nausea. Great. She'd already fucked it up. She'd walked right into its stupid little hands and gotten Ryuu … devoured, or replaced maybe, and now she wasn't even mercy-killing him efficiently. Not her week. She turned on her heel and made for her two victims, treading particularly hard, like she could stamp her frustration into the ground and leave a trail of it behind her.

Gairano weren't meant to go around just crushing Plots whenever they wanted, she told herself over and over. There were consequences for them and for other people but, to be honest, mostly for them. She'd gotten so used to being able to interact with them directly that she'd started interfering with the ones that weren't directly trying to entrap her. All she was meant to do was keep out of them herself and let them happen to others.

It had gotten Ryuu, though, she argued to herself silently, already wrist-deep in one victim's apparently empty pockets where he lay half-beneath the log she'd killed him under. Ryuu wasn't  _others,_  in the same way that Daisukenojo and Yamada weren't _._ They belonged to her. They were  _her_ people.

She stopped and sighed, suddenly tired, and absently brushed the man's eyes shut. No, the Gairano were her people. They were her family. Daisukenojo and Ryuu were her friends. If they were able to be free of Plot, they would have been born with fail-fields as well and they hadn't, so they weren't. She had to remember that. She was getting emotional- perfectly normal for a teenager, a voice suspiciously like a certain book's author said condescendingly- and not thinking clearly, but now that'd she'd realised, it was her job to get it under control.

Ryuu was not one of her people, and it had to die.

She stood and made her way to the other corpse, ignoring Ryuu's impatient yell from the other side of the clearing. Her other civilian's pockets had come up depressingly empty, except for the standard murder-paraphernalia of some knives and the inexplicable tiny shreds of paper that ended up in everyone's pockets.

'Would you hurry up!?' Ryuu yelled, its voice not even having the decency to get all high-pitched like his used to when he yelled. Now it had learned to  _project_  or some shit, and its voice was clear and even. Raiku sighed and reached out to brush the man's eyes closed, and her hand caught. Probably on some hole she had burnt into the poor man's face, so she tugged and glanced over with no small amount of irritation because this,  _this_  is the sort of gruesome fare that compassion bought you-

It looked at her with eyes gone black and wide.

She froze.

It was looking at her. She knew it was, though there was no white there, no pupils, or maybe it was all pupil, the eyes of something cold and dark.

No, no it wasn't! It was Plot, she knew, because it had to be. Some vestige caught in a dead man's skull, looking for a way out and just eerily placed. She carefully withdrew her hand and stood, but found it hard to look away.

It was looking at her, until the moment passed and then there were just the man's unremarkable brown eyes, looking at nothing, not ever again.

'Hey, one thing's bugging me,' Daisukenojo said from behind her, and she managed to tear her eyes away long enough to stumble awkwardly towards him.

She made a non-committal noise that he apparently took as invitation to continue. 'Shouldn't this all have been, I don't know…' He trailed off vaguely.

'More complicated?' she guessed, because training with Kakashi had made that her go-to guess. 'More insane? More to do with sadists dropping on you out of trees and holding knives in your face until you admit weakness and cry!?'

Daisukenojo stopped and stared at her. Raiku casually looked skyward, like she was just taking in the weather and had done nothing wrong or unusual. It was possible, maybe, that she had brought some of that to the table with her.

'Hey, you look just like him again,' he said after a moment, shoving her shoulder. 'You sure picked up a lot of mannerisms from that guy. We're gonna have our own mini-Copy-nin!' He gasped and flung out a hand, hitting her solidly in the chest. ' _Copyniniature_ ,' he breathed.

Raiku slowly lowered her gaze, enough to shoot him a narrow look. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'I dream of killing you.'

'Copycat? No, no- copykit! Because you're the baby version,' he continued, because Raiku didn't have dreams and maybe never would, and he started to walk forwards with that stupid grin still stretched across his face. 'Who's also weaker and more awkward. Whose eyesight isn't as good, who has weird and awkward, fuzzy hair-,'

'Who thinks kittens look weird?' Raiku protested. 'Who thinks that? Is this all part of your baby phobia? Why are you talking like Ryuu, suddenly?'

Daisukenojo waved a hand, but the thought struck her. Was he talking like Ryuu?

She looked around. Yamada was talking to Ryuu, his arms folded, likely unhappy about the yelling when they were already visible enough. The ground was… ground-like, and didn't seem to be possessed by any narrative force, malignant or benign.

What had she been doing?

Her anxiety was seeping back in, ramping back to full force. What the hell was happening? How had she gotten distracted,  _again_? She couldn't keep a thought together for more than a minute before it started eroding around the edges and it didn't even hurt, it didn't even  _register_? Everything hurt! She knew that- everyone knew that.

Oh. This one was clever.

She frowned beneath the mask and quickly checked the three others over. Yamada and Ryuu had wrapped up and were doing an equipment check- this likely meant Daisuke had done one for her while she'd been distracted, that little champion. That… moderately-sized champion? Actually, Daisuke was basically her assigned buddy by default a lot of the time, so he was pretty used to assessing her inventory at a glance. He was sort of like a very angry babysitter, which was an irritating thought. Sure, she had a tendency of magnetising metal objects after too long, and she lost gloves regularly from burning through the fingertips, but to-

Wait, no! Raiku dug her fingertips hard into her palms, trying to summon some grounding pain. Not again! There was nothing there, but there was  _something there_ , she may have been flighty but she was never-

'What the hell?' Daisukenojo asked, breaking her from her rapidly spiralling panic. She glanced over at him, to find it was apparently his turn to stare at the sky.

She glanced up. The clouds that had been drifting over them for weeks were growing darker, finally.  _Finally_. Some good luck. She sighed in relief. 'Maybe we'll get some actual rain?' she said hopefully. 'And it'll cool down?'

Daisukenojo was still frowning when she glanced across at him. 'Hey asshole,' he called, not looking away. 'You said these were gonna clear up.'

'Yeah- so?' Ryuu's voice was mostly clear now, audible through the Plot noise but flanged, like someone was speaking over it at all times. 'I'm not a meteorologist, I can make a bad call.'

This was enough for both Daisukenojo and Raiku to look away from the sky and directly at it, boggling. 'What did he just say?' Daisukenojo whispered. 'Did you hear it too?'

Raiku stared as well, at the increasingly irritated-looking Plot amalgam that had eaten Ryuu. 'No way,' she replied, equally hushed. Even a Plot couldn't deviate that much, could it? Surely it couldn't get Ryuu  _that wrong_. "Bad call"? an admission of fault.

'Shut up!' it said defensively.

Daisukenojo snorted and looked back up at the sky, probably trying to memorise this manifestation of one of Ryuu's only acknowledged mistakes.

Raiku rolled her shoulders again, the familiar crack-crack of released tension distracting her from this disturbing, out-of-character behaviour. She could tell Yamada was looking at her from what she could spot of him in her peripheral vision, and let her irritation spike for a moment. Of course he would think it was weird, for one of Ryuu's mistakes to pass with such little fanfare. But tolerating the creature was one thing-  _bantering_  with it was entirely another. With any luck, he'd assume it was because of her mistakes earlier that had led to this in the first place.

A cool breeze ruffled her hair, the first real relief she'd had in weeks.

'Thanks, man,' Daisukenojo said grudgingly, ignoring or somehow forgetting that Ryuu had refused to alter the weather for so much as a second for weeks, unmoved by any amount of begging, bribery attempts and at one dire point, overt death threats. 'It's a nice change. Maybe you've got a heart in there after all.'

Raiku almost choked on air. Or it could have been the thick wave of irony.

Both of them ignored her display. It snorted. 'Like I'd help you after your gloating just now.'

'Your weather predictions must be worse than I thought,' Daisuke snickered, cuing a round of bickering. It wouldn't matter how much of Ryuu it got wrong, it seemed; no matter what discrepancies, what gaps, the narrative stamp of RYUU across it was all anyone else would see.

Raiku rubbed her face wearily. She couldn't help but empathise with her father, who saw more of this shit than anyone. 'So!' she said, forcing brightness. 'I guess we should… move the bodies?'

Yamada shrugged and she looked at him, unable to help it despite desire to avoid his gaze. His every move just set off the threat-detection part of her brain, it wasn't her fault! "We could."

'…Could?' she echoed.

"Or we could leave them here," he said. "In case they really did have back-up, get me?"

Raiku cast her gaze to the man lying still, at where his hands had dug into the soil against whatever had happened. His bitten fingernails, just like Daisuke's. 'You… want to leave them as an example?' she asked slowly, and was proud of how her voice didn't waver.

Yamada was watching her, dark eyes unreadable. He nodded.

Raiku had never been the problem when it came to killing people; he knew it, she knew it, Daisuke frequently brought up her cavalier approach to human life as a matter of course. She had the same programmed moral outrage as anyone and a healthy dose of squeamishness, but she was much faster to turn it off, much quicker to leap to the capital decision than Daisuke or even Ryuu ever had been. It felt strange, now, for him to watch her so carefully when it just came to the matter of the bodies left behind. It felt strange, now, for some part of her to object to just leaving them out in the open. But they'd died as themselves- some part of that was a privilege, now.

'Hey, douchebag! Cut it out!' Daisuke's yell cut through the odd tension between her and Yamada. They both turned, breaking eye contact. He was bristling with outrage, struggling to keep his overloaded pack steady in the sudden rising wind.

Yamada exhaled audibly through his nose, a sharp sound of annoyance. "Sullen! Cut that shit out!"

Ryuu glared at both of them, one hand raised to its head to keep its hair out of its face. 'Oh, like all wind on earth is my fault?!' it snapped. It jabbed a finger up towards the sky. 'It's been shitty weather for weeks, and now I'm responsible?!'

Raiku cast her gaze upwards. The intensifying cloud cover had grown darker the longer they'd stood there, made darker still by the Plot-black flecks still drifting through the air. 'So fast?' she asked incredulously. 'Are you kidding me?' She looked around. 'Isn't this a little on the nose?!'

Reflexively, she looked back on the ground. The Plot wrapped around Ryuu's ankles thrashed impatiently.

God, she thought wearily, give her the patience to deal with some Genematrix theatrics, these ridiculous Plot  _histrionics_  without losing her mind. Again, so soon after it had forced matters last time? And come on, storm clouds? Hadn't her own Plot had enough of that particular portent? Oh no, she sniggered sarcastically in the back of her mind; not a thunderstorm. Anything but the combination of things that her team was uniquely poised to manage without issue. Anything but  _heavy-handed symbolism_.

There was a clap of thunder in the distance, the flash of dry lightning that rung hollow to her without the grasping heat it usually drew from her. She huffed petulantly.

"Speedy?" Yamada asked, low and warning, wind catching enough to whip his words away in the growing noise.

'It's not me!' she protested, offended, sinking into a crouch like she could get away from the goddamn sky, or possibly the doomcloud of Yamada's outrage. 'I can't feel it at all!'

Yamada turned. "Sullen?!"

'I told you it wasn't me!' Ryuu shouted, over the rising wind. 'I can't feel anything!'

'Do you even use those stupid senses!?' Daisukenojo's yell was becoming increasingly hard to hear; the storm had blown in within seconds and she could feel the wind tearing at her clothes, the ambient drop in temperature and a strange sharp, metallic smell. 'It's fucking  _windy_!'

She turned, hands clapped over her ears to protect them from the stinging wind and Ryuu was basically tearing its hair out, a look of agonised confusion visible through the hair being whipped wildly around its face. 'No, it's not!'

"It clearly goddamn is!" Yamada bellowed.

There was a sudden thunderclap, loud enough that Raiku could feel it.

But she  _couldn't._

A sharp spike of chakra from Yamada. " _Speedy_!"

'Does this look natural to you?!' she shouted, voice already hoarse from trying to be heard over the din. It was too dark to make out his features clearly, anymore.

Yamada's arm was straining – Yamada,  _straining_ \- against something so thin her eyes watered, something too weak to matter but so black it was like a slice through the air.

Really, the Gairano part of her asked;  _really_? She could guess what would happen next, and furtively looked around for the telltale sign of shinobi in the area, knowing Ryuu's family would show up at any second. For dramatic monologues, no doubt. She was already skipping ahead to try and work out the best way to cut it off, or at least abbreviate what she was sure was coming.

Which would be, in retrospect, a mistake.

There was a sudden lurch around her midriff and the dizzying jerk of the world around her, abrupt weightlessness from what she realised was herself starting to get shoved off her feet by the wind and her own startled scream. She tried to flatten herself and ended up being bodily dragged backwards by something part-wind and part-not, the icy, oily ache of Plot wrapping around her feet. She shrieked, fingers dragging against the ground and leaving raised furrows, the fabric of her gloves ripped through from the friction of resisting and her failing grip on the ground.

"Speedy!"

'Yamada!' she screamed, trying to scrabble back to the safety of the ground. She heard Daisukenojo's faint cry and a hand shot into her vision, grabbing at her own.

'Raiku!' Ryuu's voice cried. 'Hold on to me!' She shook her head desperately, her whole body trying to recoil from it even as she tried to hang onto the ground more firmly. Her grip failed just as Ryuu reached her, wide black eyes too blank in its lovely, terrified face before she flew backwards, a solid impact to the back of her head sending her into a red-black flash of pain.

 

 

 

 

 

It's Mura that she thinks of.

Raiku hadn't thought of her as often as she maybe should have, but it's Mura's face there. Her father's face as he sits across from her, the way the two seem somehow the same.

I killed her. The words on his newspaper stretch across his hands, his lowered eyelids, down his arms, neatly printed over and over. I killed her for what she did to you,

and then it pulls him apart.

 

 

 

 

 

She was warm.

Raiku's mind dredged itself up from the depressingly familiar abyss to register that first: she was warm. Warm enough to feel the tackiness of drying sweat on her temples, the backs of her knees and the small of her back.

The second, her exhausted brain doggedly continued, after it had absorbed enough new information, was that she felt like  _shit_. She jolted fully awake with a gasp and a groan, muscles overtaxed screaming at her in protested when she tried and failed to curl into a ball. A heavy weight across her midriff stopped her. Or that could have been the hot, throbbing ache in the back of her head, or the sharp sting of her ribs when she exhaled.

Why, she silently lamented, did so many chapters of her life start this way? Why couldn't she just end the day by falling asleep and then wake up in that same place, rather than always dramatically losing consciousness the second a Plot touched her? This was why her family gave her shit about being a sissy. Who fainted the second the Genematrix looked at them? It was like the damn thing was determined to beat her up as much as it could possibly get away with. Using her as a proxy for the frustration all Gairano had caused it over the years.

It was probably a dead body lying on her, that same morbid corner of her mind said glumly. Or maybe her abduction-by-weather had left her paralysed. That would be her luck exactly. Though it was unlikely to be Yamada, or she'd have been crushed to death long before she woke.

Raiku sighed, trying to marshal the strength of conviction to open her eyes. She wanted to lie down. She was already lying down, but she was lying where, by the feels of her various aches and pains, she had been thrown. That didn't count. She wanted to  _make the choice_ to lie down and she wanted her dad to come in and say something mortifying and then tell her it would be okay, that her long day was over.

Her dad wasn't coming, though. She sighed again, tilted her head up and opened her eyes.

Her vision was grey. For a moment she almost had enough energy to panic, until she could focus enough to make out the little individual lines crossing her vision, the flickering streaks of black.

Ryuu, because of course it was Ryuu, exhaled heavily against the fabric covering her neck, its hair blown across her face to obstruct her vision because Ryuu could be an asshole in any state of consciousness. Raiku took this in stoically, the way it'd fallen halfway across her, the way its head rested on her bruised collarbone and the surprising weight of it, pressing her down into the ground. The grip of its hand still around her wrist, the skin there sore and hot with what could have been a fracture or a bruise. She'd assumed the thing would be lighter, she'd realised. She'd expected it to be hollow inside, to have discarded the parts of Ryuu he wouldn't be needing anymore.

She swallowed. Unceremoniously, she reached her uncovered fingertips and dug them into its hair to touch its scalp and jolt it awake.

There was that strange disconnect, that gap between what she knew and felt would happen and what did. Or rather, what didn't. Moments passed, just the silkiness of its hair and that curious, organic feeling of its skin resting against her fingertips before the creature stirred on its own, a huff against her clothes and the curious, alien feeling of muscles shifting against her.

'Raiku?' it asked, voice muzzy and barely coherent, lifting its head slightly.

She jerked her hand back like it had bitten her, feeling the catch of hairs between her fingers and ripping free of its scalp. It made a low noise of complaint and let its head drop back down, forcing the breath out of her.

What. The fuck, Raiku thought in a daze, staring at the hairs glinting between her fingers.

She nodded once, and then again, and then she just kept nodding until the feeling bubbling up in her chest exploded up.

'Get off me!' she shrieked, shoving it harshly. It jerked upwards and rolled away, letting her up enough to get into a painful crouch and desperately pat herself down like she could brush off whatever germs it had left on her.

'What the hell?' it exclaimed, fixing a glare on her when it rolled to a stop, propped on one arm and shedding the soil it had picked up on the way. 'What is wrong with you?!'

'Wrong with  _me_?' she repeated incredulously, finding she did indeed have the correct number of fingers, toes and zero-sum of Plot. 'You were on top of me! You're what's wrong!'

'I was  _unconscious_ ,' it snapped. 'It's not like I did it on purpose!' It got to its feet in what it probably hoped was a huffy way, but that looked too painful to sell as truly indignant. 'Excuse me for getting caught up in the same monster-storm that you did!' The effect was further ruined by the way it stretched its back with a loud popping noise.

'You're excused,' she hissed, straightening up with even less grace than it had. She braced her hands on her hips and tried to stretch out her lower back, cramped and agonising after lying on the ground with-

Her mind skipped the rest of the sentence. With what had happened, it supplied instead. She raised a hand to gingerly touch the back of her head and winced against the sudden sting, but it came back clear of blood in a small mercy. 'Shouldn't even had had to deal with that storm,' she muttered.  _Ryuu_  could have stopped it, she thought with no small amount of vindictiveness.

'We got thrown into a tree,' Ryuu grumbled, trying to get its tangled hair out of its face. 'More than one.' She had touched that hair, she thought a tad hysterically, fingertips twitching. She had gotten  _all up in that hair_.

She blinked hard and finally turned to look around. Snapped branches and upturned earth greeted her everywhere she looked, but for one of her blackouts, it was surprisingly tame in terms of destruction. It was darker, she noticed, probably closer to the end of the day by now and moving into evening, but the trees around them swayed under a normal wind, in a normal way. Sans more than a few branches, but no sign of fire or whatever fight Yamada must have put up, so that was something.

At least it wasn't raining, she thought, casting a bleary eye towards a clearer, early evening sky. That would have just been the perfect finale to their day.

'I can't feel Yamada or Daisukenojo,' Ryuu said as it yanked a stick out of its arm and sealed it with a quick flare of chakra and a wince. 'What about you?'

Raiku rolled her eyes around to give it a dirty look, ignoring how even that made the pain in her head shoot down her neck. It stared back, darkness flickering through its eyes whenever it blinked, a second, oily eyelid. Good, she thought uncharitably; good. It didn't deserve to look at her with Ryuu's eyes, no matter how creepy they were.

'No,' she said as derisively as she could after it became clear it was still waiting for a response. 'I can't.'

Its lips twisted. 'Let me have a look at your head.' It stepped towards her, branches crunching underfoot. It stopped when she immediately skittered a few steps in the opposite direction, skin flashing and sparking for just a moment.

'I'm fine!' she said, voice high and tense. 'No need.' She rubbed the back of her head vigorously, the sharp uptick in throbbing making her briefly wish for death, and then displayed her hands for it to look at. 'No blood.'

It narrowed Ryuu's eyes at her. 'External bleeding isn't really the concern with a head trauma, Speedy.' It said slowly. 'Just come over here.'

Raiku looked at it.

I could do it, she thought. I could kill it right here, and no one would see.

Its ersatz eyelids flickered again.

Raiku grimaced. With the mask, it would at least look a little like a smile.

'We can't stay here,' it said eventually, when she said nothing, didn't bridge the yawning gap between them. 'If this is the sort of disaster that the other teams came across, Yamada and Daisukenojo could already be dead. We have to find a patrol and send news back.'

Raiku narrowed her eyes. 'I really doubt they'd leave us alive if they'd managed to kill  _Yamada_. We'd be easy after that.'

Ryuu shook its head. 'We're stuck in the middle of nowhere. It's not too late for them to come and finish us off if we don't get out of here.'

Damn. That was actually a pretty good point.

It wasn't done, apparently, and it kept talking as it started brushing dirt and leaves from its clothes. 'If we can get up high enough, we can see where Iji is and use that to figure out where we are. Maybe swing back through there to send a message home.'

Her lips twisted. 'Yamada said they lied to us.'

It folded its arms. 'There are teams of ours moving through there, and it intersects with one of our patrol routes.'

Raiku struggled to repress the urge to fidget uncomfortably. Everything it was saying made sense. It all seemed perfectly logical. Everything it said was … right. It seemed right, and felt right.

But she knew damn well that it wasn't, couldn't be, and the fact she couldn't tell why was starting to make her headache worse.

Of course it wanted to go back to Iji, where the next step in this little drama would undoubtedly kick off. Its motives weren't the rational, sensible things that her and Ryuu would ordinarily have come up with.

But what if, her brain suggested, she didn't want to do that? What if they did… anything else?

What if she just  _lay down and died_. What the hell would this amoral, soulless causality engine do then?!

Raiku dragged her palms down her face, stretching her features out, and groaned.

She had done this to herself, really. She was the one who had bemoaned this whole thing being too linear, too  _straightforward_. Well, how was this for straightforward?

Apparently realising she was too wrapped up in her own thoughts to meaningfully contribute, Ryuu leapt into the trees. Probably to get a view of Iji, she mused, or to ... sprout wings of some sort and fly into the sunset, ruining that too.


	64. sharp teeth and smug little eyes

Raiku knew for a fact that they were being watched.

She brushed another leaf out of her hair, sure (yet again) that it would be the last and she would finally be free of foliage. Next to her, Ryuu walked with its typical light steps.

She trudged, just to be spiteful. And while she was on the subject: 'Are you sure that this is the right way?' she asked, dragging her ruined gloves off and replacing them with one of the three spare sets Yamada mandated she carry at all times.

Ryuu shot her a baleful look and didn't dignify it with a response.

She threw her hands up. 'Sorry for questioning you,  _my lord_.'

Really, she was just trying to fill the silence. She ducked under a branch and let her mind drift towards the small nexus of conductivity in her mind, the typical blend of running water and metal that told her exactly where Iji was in relation to their position. With any luck, they'd get there before it was particularly late, though it was already dark. They  _would_  have been there already, except Ryuu had decided her "significantly elevated risk of brain trauma" shouldn't be exacerbated by "totally unnecessary power usage", so walking it was.

It was probably a little odd she could no longer decide when the real Ryuu would have been genuinely concerned versus condescending, but she could chalk it up to history. She had given up trying to keep her distance from it in the dark, the thing automatically gravitating to her trademark glow, and had to settle for ignoring the way their shoulders would sometimes brush against each other.

So really, it came as a relief to realise they were being watched.

'I think I see light ahead,' Ryuu said, carelessly letting the branch it had pushed aside swing back to narrowly miss her. 'We must be getting close.' Raiku clambered over a fallen log and made a general noise of agreement, just ignoring the casual disregard for her safety. It would have been a good sign, if she were more fanciful, but Ryuu wasn't coming back; it could get the hang of him, but it wasn't him.

Right. Being watched.

It wasn't that she could feel eyes on her, because to be totally honest, Raiku was paranoid enough to feel that way most of the time. It wasn't any of her standard senses, it wasn't the extra one, and it wasn't any of the weird shinobi ones she'd never really gotten the hang of, either.

They were being watched, and that certainty was one hundred percent based on a lifetime of terrible novels. Also because, as it became more obvious that Ryuu was right and they were approaching the village again, she could see the Plot sliding along trees like another shadow in the light and vanishing in the spaces between. And the little bastard had holes in it like eyes.  _Smug_  little eyes.

Raiku realised she'd been frowning so hard that her forehead was hurting.

That. That was uncalled-for. That was just  _petty behaviour._

'What do we do when we actually get there?' she asked. Ryuu glanced back at her. She swung under a low branch as an excuse to break eye contact. 'I mean. If they really did lie to us, then we can't just walk in.'

'We're absolutely going to walk in,' Ryuu sighed, sending another branch snapping towards her in what was absolutely a deliberate way this time. 'We're just gonna go to the inn and see if there's another team there who can help us. They're not some enemy camp, and you're super obvious anyway.'

Raiku huffed.  _'You_  were the one everyone was staring at before.'

'What was that?'

She rolled her eyes. 'Nothing, nothing. Let me guess: if there's no one there, we're going to go off and find a patrol to send a report back.'

It grunted in agreement, picking up into a light jog when the trees parted enough to show a low, stone wall, the lights from the window beyond spilling out over it.

She lengthened her stride to keep up, but wasn't willing to let it go. 'And what, we're just going to leave Daisuke and Yamada behind?'

'We don't have a better idea,' it pointed out, deftly vaulting over the low wall and into Iji proper. Well. Iji-back-of-someone's-overgrown-yard proper. It swung around a clothesline, making for the weathered garden door to the backstreets.

Raiku wasn't going to pout. She  _wasn't_. She wasn't going to pout because the Genematrix beast had made a decent point, because even a broken clock was right once to twice a day depending on whether it used twenty-four hour time or not. She was going to swing past this with minimal drama, make her way back to the conspicuously (now ominously) named innkeeper Tadano Taro and if this thing had any sense of symmetry, Yamada and Daisuke would be there when they arrived.

Her thoughts distracted her just long enough for a light to switch on in the backyard they were trespassing through. 'What the hell are you doing in my yard?!'

Raiku yelped and broke into a sprint.

 

 

 

 

 

'What the hell are you doing back?' Taro asked, not even bothering to look up from what was intimidatingly small writing in a needlessly large ledger. He had little semicircle glasses, perched precariously far down his nose. 'Didn't you have some mission to get to?'

'Tadano. Tadano Taro. Can I just say, it is so good to see you,' Raiku said, leaning over on the desk to prop her chin on her hands. 'It really is.'

He glanced at her over his glasses. 'Didn't you start a bar fight and flee town?' he asked suspiciously. He scanned her charming visage. 'Or beat up some of the landscaping?'

Something tugged sharply on the back of her head. As she clapped her hands there, Ryuu dropped a twig wrapped in several long white hairs onto the floor. It pushed her aside. 'Have you seen anyone else from Konoha here today?'

Taro looked back down at his stupid, stereotypical ledger. 'No.'

Ryuu frowned. 'Really, no one?'

'Yes, really, no one.' Taro groped around for an eraser, because apparently the conversation was over.

Ryuu and Raiku exchanged looks. Or they would have, if Raiku had been able to look closer than its right ear without shuddering. She drew it to the side, not actually sure what to do. Yamada and Daisuke should have been there. Or some sort of clue, maybe? The Plot was doing its own thing, as far as she could see. Just sort of…  _woobling_  around, which was just a less committal form of wobbling. 'Do you actually know where a patrol route intersects with us?' she whispered.

Ryuu gave her a haughty look.

She narrowed her eyes.  _Ryuu_  might have known, but who knew what details had been shoved out of his head to make way for whatever this thing needed to know. Probably all sorts of emotional details were cluttering up the joint now, where Ryuu had stored cold, hard facts instead.

'…No,' it finally conceded.

'Why didn't you just say that?!'

It made an abortive, frustrated gesture. 'Are you going to complain or are you going to help me think of what to do?!'

Raiku rocked back on her heels and folded her arms. It had a good point. She wasn't exactly being helpful. She hunched slightly, drumming her fingers on her arms.

...Not that she  _had_  to be helpful. This was all going to go precisely one way, after all; whichever way the Genematrix had decided it should when it did this to Ryuu. Just long enough for it to get over-excited and for her to kill him.

'We could wait for someone to pass through,' she said eventually, keeping her eyes on the floor. Pretending to be deep in thought, but more monitoring their eerie dark hitchhiker to see what it went for next.

It had paused in place.

Typical. So they were playing a game of chicken, were they? Joke was on the Plot; she was  _the biggest chicken alive_.

'Do we have any money to stay here?' Ryuu countered. 'No. We do not. You see my wallet anywhere?' It patted its pockets in a needlessly sarcastic fashion. 'All I've got is loose change.'

'You saying you're too good to camp?' she hissed. The ink-blotch of Plot remained still.

'We can't camp in the middle of the  _village,_  where we need to be.'

'Could you take this outside?' Taro asked, sounding bored. While they'd been hiding in a corner and muttering like a couple of totally normal people, he'd started switching off lights. 'I'm closing the front desk for the night.'

Raiku, as decided earlier, was not going to pout. But it was warm and dark outside, like the shitty day was showing its soft underbelly to lull her into a false sense of security. She didn't trust her judgement when he metaphors got that weird. She made a last-ditch attempt. 'Can't we… start a tab or something?'

Taro flicked the lights off in the dining room with a decisive  _click_. 'No tabs.' He ushered them both, all one-point-five people outside into the dark, and shut the entryway light off behind them. The door didn't slam, but the spirit of finality still came across.

Raiku skittered to a stop on the stone, put her hands on her hips and just took a second to mentally regroup. Ryuu was muttering grumpily to itself, which would buy her a few moments free of the black hole it felt like to her senses.

So. The inn had been a bust. The Plot was playing possum, or had possibly suffered from heart failure. She could hear crickets chirping in the humid darkness, and the winding, stone-walled paths of Iji were already growing darker as lights were shut off, as doors closed to them. Basically a recipe for her and Ryuu to do some appropriately back-dropped bonding for filler—or god forbid, end up cuddled up for the night—which was never going to happen. All of Iji was basically an enormous relationship-building trap, apparently.

She rubbed the back of her neck.  _Think, Raiku._

Right. If they were going to proceed, they needed to locate either a Plot Device, their team or someone from Konoha. Or an enemy, which...

She tilted her head back, eyebrows raised in consideration. The stars above them were dim and flickering, too buffeted by the turbulence such warm summer air always brought.

The enemy? Violence could be good! She could really go for some violence, all things considered. There was just something about meeting resistance, feeling it suddenly give way.

She turned the soothing rub of her neck into a harder clawing motion, shaking her head. No no! No there wasn't! That was the indignation talking. She had to be smart about this, she couldn't just zap her way out of this one.

'Is this the only inn?' Ryuu asked, breaking the peaceful night ambience. With its stupid, plagiarised voice.

Raiku didn't even bother to think about it now that it was clearly on a roll. She shrugged.

'How can you not know? You spent weeks here, you spent the most time here out of any of us!'

She waved a hand tiredly. 'Yeah, but the only places we deliberately went were of strategic value. And in case you didn't notice, we sort of had to stop doing that after—oh, how many was it—one place?!' She hesitated. 'Unless you count the takoyaki stand, but I'm really just thinking of the one venue.'

The less said about that bar, she thought darkly, the better.

Ryuu shoved its hair back from where it had started to fall over its forehead. 'Well, how likely is it that they would have mentioned you to any other shinobi passing by?'

She eyed it. As best as she could in the dark, anyway. 'You mean "how likely are they to remember that person who tried to blow the whole place up," and then kick us out immediately?' she asked pointedly. 'No. We're not going back there. I'll get lynched. I almost got lynched last time!'

Ryuu made a show of looking around. 'I'm sorry—how many other options do we have?'

The ensuing stand-off was only really interrupted by the crickets who, despite their best efforts, continued to add little value to the proceedings.

'How about this,' she said, steepling her fingers, widening her eyes and speaking slowly, clearly. 'I refuse to go back there, and if you try and make me, I will burn it down with everyone still inside.'

Ryuu looked taken aback. It was a deeply unnatural look for it to wear.

Raiku raised her eyebrows. 'Including you.'  _Especially you_.

The seconds ticked on. Metaphorically, in the absence of either a clock or literally any amenities. Because they were broke, in the middle of the street and threatening homicide. A frankly worrying trend that had arisen in their lives.

'Ha!' she broke into forced, nervous laughter. 'Or we could use that loose change on food and regroup! We'll work something out, that would be the thing to do, definitely, that's what we'll do.' As if on cue, because it was, her stomach growled. Good old stomach, she thought fondly. So predictable. Also, so goddamn hungry.

It relaxed slightly, but the wary set of its features wasn't completely gone.

God. Threaten to commit murderous arson  _one time_  as a  _joke, probably_.

'…The teahouse will probably still be open,' it said grudgingly, jerking its head in some random direction. 'Since it serves alcohol. Food'll be cheap there.'

She creased her eyes in a smile, too cheesy by half. 'Great! Greatness! Let's do it, come on!' She bounded a few steps ahead before settling into a more normal stride, shoving her hands in her pockets.

Ryuu scrubbed a hand down its face when it caught up, leading her down a wider, more worn stone path towards a better-lit series of buildings. The low hum of voices was carried towards them as they approached. 'Any idea of where to start? I'd rather not just run back to Konoha without the other two.'

Raiku hummed. She had known precisely three elite shinobi in her life, and from the available data there she knew they would behave in certain ways. She started to tick things off on her fingers. 'Yamada goes home to his family, which ANBU obviously can't do here. Or he yells at children until they exercise to the point of vomiting, which they... could do here?' She shook her head after considering it for a moment. 'But probably isn't standard practice. So the Hokage drinks and gambles, and Kakashi reads porn. Those are the only references I have.'

Ryuu was giving her a weird look. She didn't even need to check, she just knew.

'…We need to find better role models,' she concluded, dropping her hand. It grunted in agreement and gestured to the building at the far end of the street. It was a classic wooden affair, with green cloth drapes to mark the entrance and the cheerful chatter of customers who  _weren't_  homicidal drunks, so Raiku liked it already. The earthy, indefinably clean smell of tea wafted out.

Ryuu gestured. 'After you.'

Probably hoping to get any lynching out of the way before it had to walk in, she reflected, but walked in anyway.

There was a trend, she had noticed, of people slapping the label of "teahouse" onto what were, in fact, just little restaurants that served tea and made the waitresses wear more traditional clothing. There was a series of long benches and tables, forcing people to sit with strangers— _gross_ —and it could have passed for pop-up stall, if the floor hadn't been hardwood.

'I'll go order,' Ryuu said, coming up behind her.

'You don't know what I want!' she protested.

'Oh, yes I do. You want the "whatever is affordable" special. Go find a table.'

Good point, actually. Another, which was a trend she didn't love. She The furthest end of the far table was free, probably because everyone else was as uncomfortable passing by literally everyone in the restaurant to eat, just like she was. Because her fears were totally normal and definitely shared by others. She stuck her hands in her pockets and made her way over, pretending she couldn't feel the weird looks. She pulled the bench out slightly so she wouldn't have to awkwardly fold her long legs into her seat, bracing a hand on the table.

_Bang!_

She blinked.

She looked down at her hand.

The wood had split open and cracked lengthwise down the length of the table, immediately seared black under her palm. The civilian sitting across the table stared at her, frozen in the act of lifting his teacup to his mouth.

Raiku stared back, wood of the table continuing to smoke under her fingertips. '…Well then,' she said eventually. 'That will… This… This was a lesson. To everyone. Everyone involved has learnt something important today. Yes.' She yanked her hand back up and brushed the splinters from her gloves, yanking one long one out of her palm. 'Yep!'

The man's teacup had broken in his white-knuckled grip, but he just continued to boggle at her.

'You… you should probably, uh, see someone about that!' Raiku said lamely, trying valiantly to summon up some cheer in the face of frankly depressing odds. She squinted. 'That looks… oh, yes, that's blood, you're bleeding.'

Without blinking, the man slowly transferred his gaze to his hand like he had never seen it before. Blood dripped to the table.

'Well, I think we can go ahead and call this a resounding success,' Raiku gritted out to Ryuu. It snorted and pushed past her, the nonchalance of the act ruined somewhat when it jolted, a thin arc of electricity passing between them.

'Fuck!'

Raiku recoiled, either from the jolt or the curse, it could have been either, and heard a crunch when she stepped back. Looking down, a small bowl she had knocked off the table was now crushed underfoot. 'Oh come on!'

She had to leave. This was escalating again. Either she or the town was cursed, and only one of them would come out of things unscathed if she stuck around.

'What the fuck is with you today?!' Ryuu demanded, stalking after her and back to square one: the great and awful, irredeemable outdoors. 'First you threaten me, then you assault some random civilian,' and she could hear its footsteps and she was moving away, it was grabbing her arm and pulling her back to face it with its stupid hands and its stupid voice and its stupid _, stolen_ face _-_

Ryuu slowly breathed in, so close she could feel it on her face, too close, and Raiku dimly registered that she was the one who had closed that distance, left them inches away from each other. She was the one with her hand splayed across its chest and her long, pointed fingers digging into its sternum hard enough to feel flesh start to give beneath her fingertips, enough for her bones to vibrate with the strain of not dragging down and tearing it apart herself. Enough to feel her tendons fray.

'Raiku,' it said slowly, softly, its too-yellow eyes watching her from its too-perfect face. 'What are you doing?'

Raiku forced herself to exhale slowly through her nose, dragging another breath in with equal, measured care. She knew her eyes were opened too wide, too focused; she knew her whole body was too tense, too clearly broadcasting intent with her every muscle, but she didn't feel  _angry_ , why wasn't she  _angry_ , why wasn't she  _mad_  when she should have been, she got to have just one  _second_  to-

'Is everything alright out here?' someone called, because actually, no she didn't. Disoriented, Raiku dragged her gaze from Ryuu's face to see the waiter standing in the doorway to the restaurant, her inadvertent victim hovering just in sight behind him while a taller companion awkwardly pressed a napkin to his bloody fingers. She realised how close she was standing to the monster, the warning vibrations in the air of the Plot encountering Entirely Too Much Gairano in one place and starting to get skittish. She stepped back. Ryuu reached up to rub its chest absently.

'We're fine,' it called over its shoulder. 'Long day.'

The waiter grunted, apparently satisfied they were at least not coming back in, and disappeared back inside while the injured patron hovered for a few seconds, likely terrified she'd change her mind and come back for him, before his friend dragged him away.

The two of them stared at each other in the waning light.

This wasn't working.

She could try anything she wanted, she could make any decision that she liked, but if it didn't feed into the right machinations, they were never going to get anywhere.

So...

'What if it was your family?' she asked, hating herself for the way the Plot grew outwards, like a living shadow under Ryuu's feet. Hating herself for encouraging it, even if it was the only way to hurt it in a way that would matter.

Ryuu stiffened.

'You said you'd never heard from them again, after they attacked us last time,' she persisted. 'But I don't think that's true.'

'Raiku,' it said, in Ryuu's deep voice made even lower. 'Stop.'

Raiku felt a hum start to build in her chest, that tooth's edge vibration resonating through the heavy, blank place its head had rested. 'Have they come back for you again? Is that what all this was about, them just trying to lure you here so they could kill the rest of us off and—what, abduct you?' She flexed her hands uselessly into fists just to crush something, just to squeeze out that space between her fingers. 'Kill you?'

'Raiku. Stop talking,' it said softly.

She would have been frightened of Ryuu, to see that look on his face. To hear him speak that softly. She opened her mouth to speak again, eyes closed to brace herself when Ryuu made a small, choked noise.

She looked up.

Ryuu was frozen, the blood drained from its face. Raiku quickly spun around to see what had it so petrified, but the street behind her was dark and empty. She couldn't sense anything. She turned back, confused, and it didn't react. It stood stock still.

'What?' she demanded, trying desperately to detect anything out of the ordinary. Nothing. She waved a hand cautiously in front of its face.

Nothing.

Raiku moved to take a step back, and that's when she saw him.

There was a man looking at them, his hands in his pockets and shoulders relaxed and he could have been an innkeeper or a store clerk or a florist or any other number of civilian archetypes because her eyes were watering just trying to find a defining feature on him. She went to wave and found her hand unresponsive, where she had clenched it at her side.

 _Him_.

Him? He could have been twenty five, or fifty five, his hair a sort of unfortunate mix of browns that could have been grey or just dull. His eyes weren't entirely brown but they weren't entirely green either, and they were slowly moving over them like he had all the time in the world to just… take it all in.

 _Him_.

She jerked her head like she could shake the thought loose.

Him, though? There was nothing special about him, and with a certainty that seemed to come from her bones, not learned but instilled through generation after generation of Gairano genetic inheritance, Raiku knew that this was all, somehow, because of him.

He looked at her blankly, looked right through her and Ryuu still wasn't moving.

It seemed impossible. There was nothing offensive or even remarkable about him but there was a feeling, hot and vicious, growing at the base of her spine, something stretching to her fingers and making her feel, suddenly, exactly how sharp her teeth were.

He walked over with his hands stuck in his pockets, as casual as can be. As he got close to them, Raiku still transfixed, he pulled a knife out. It wasn't a kunai, or any of the weapons she was used to; it was a wood-handled knife, a short, utilitarian thing that wouldn't be out of place in a kitchen. The sort of thing her dad would like; a knife just meant to cut things and to do nothing else.

It was so banal in its simplicity that Raiku just watched for a moment, fingers twitching and eyes caught on his ordinary and impossible face, until he started to raise the knife towards Ryuu's frozen neck.

She leapt into action, hand lashing out to grip his wrist and twist it sharply. He gave a short, surprised yell, the knife dropping from his hand to clatter on stone. It sliced a shallow line through Ryuu's shirt on the way down, but it said nothing, did nothing even as it began to bleed sluggishly.

Raiku forced him to his knees, holding his arm at a cruel angle behind his back. 'What do you think you're doing?!' she demanded.

She could break his neck. She could see the line of it, the tension there pulling it back from his struggle against her grip, the awkward line of his body contorted around the twisted joint. She could break his neck, she could lean down and sink her teeth into that skin and pour lightning through him until there was nothing left but ashes and the taste of metal in her mouth, she could-

Raiku swallowed harshly, mouth suddenly dry. Her eyes were burning, like she hadn't blinked in a while. 'Who are you?!' She twisted the wrist she held just a little more, and couldn't have said why.

He made a sound, a nothing-noise of pain, but said nothing.

She shook him. 'What did you do to Ryuu?' do to not-Ryuu, the not-Ryuu that wasn't hers but wasn't his to take away.

Raiku heard a spare, minimal sort of noise, and realised after an uncomfortable moment that he was laughing through the pain. It wasn't a normal sort of laugh; it was stripped down, like the bones of a laugh laid bare and free of marrow, ringing hollow. 'You think that's your friend,' he stated more than asked. He had a strange voice, she realised distantly, one she could just make out through the roaring in her ears. His tone was even, the pitch mid-range, but it had an edge in it she didn't understand. Like a fine line had been drawn through it, now wavering just slightly.

'I think you tried to stab—' it, ' _him_ ,' she corrected with some difficulty. 'So you can start talking or I can start hurting you.' She yanked his arm up higher and could feel the strain of a joint barely holding on to its socket. 'It's really that simple.'

'How are you doing this?' he asked instead. 'Why do you see me?'

...This was a weird one, even for Raiku.

'Because you're right in front of me?' she said, the words coming out more of a question despite herself. Irritated, she shook him again. 'Hey! I'm asking the questions!'

'Just let me go,' he sighed, after he had obligingly made some further pained noises and wow, she had really gotten much closer to dislocating that arm than she had planned. 'There's really no point to doing this.'

What is this day, she thought to herself wonderingly. What kind of day should she even call this? In what universe did a weird-looking shinobi grabbing you, saying they would kill you, threatening to snap your arm off even, get this lacklustre a response? Was she that bad at this? Oh god, had Mayuko been right? Or Kakashi, for that matter?!

Ignorant of her brewing existential crisis, the man shook his head. 'I didn't have much of a window here,' he remarked. 'I guess I should have been more careful.'

'A window?' she pressed, 'what kind of—' she trailed off, gaze falling to the floor.

Ryuu's Plot was stretched out, flattened, immobile. She had seen that before she'd laid eyes on this asshole. But where she had forced this man to his knees, it had shied away, a perfect circle of free space around their feet. As if it couldn't bear to come into contact with one or both of them in any way. It made sense, for Gairano Raiku. It made sense for a Gairano and she saw it all the time with her father, the way the Genematric shuddered and cleared the ground in front of him. This perfect circle in the black was shuddering, starting to pour outwards like an overflowing sink.

Heart pounding, Raiku fisted a hand in his hair and dragged his head back to look at his face, past his pained expression. She knew every member of her family. She knew them all by sight and by sound and they all did, they all knew each other well enough to remember each other like no one else did. She did not know this man.

'How did you do this?' she demanded. 'Who are you?'

He had his eyes screwed shut with pain and cracked them open just slightly to look into hers, into her horrified expression. Something seemed to flicker in his eyes, for a moment, something like recognition and he opened his mouth to—

'Raiku! Raiku, hello!?'

It was getting too familiar, now, Raiku reflected; the sound of Daisukenojo breaking through her concentration, that was. His fingers snapped in front of her nose. She jerked back and almost fell to the ground, expected resistance from her captive where there was none. Where there was no captive.

She was still staring at her empty hands, uncomprehending, when Ryuu and Daisukenojo were predictably snapping at each other.

'Where the hell have you been?' Ryuu demanded. 'We dragged ourselves back here and you and Yamada were what, off sightseeing?'

'Hey, I don't have Yamada! I thought you had him!' Daisukenojo was, when she finally actually paid attention to him, in pretty poor shape. He still had his pack, and hers apparently, but he had rough scrapes up and down his shins, some along his forearms. There were long, shallow scratches on one side of his face and overall he looked… basically like he'd fallen out of a tree and hit every branch on the way down. He also looked tired and irritated, but that was to be expected. 'You can't expect me to carry all this shit, by myself, and keep track of Yamada!'

'Daisukenojo!' Raiku cried, finally catching up with events. She grabbed his shoulder in lieu of the more dangerous Hug option. 'I'm so glad you found us, I was so worried!'

He huffed, but seemed slightly placated. 'I knew you two would end up bein' lunatics somewhere,' he said gruffly. 'So I just followed the trail of destruction.'

Which. Hurtful.

Raiku pushed past it. 'But you haven't seen Yamada anywhere?'

'We've already covered that,' Ryuu sniped, but they both ignored him.

'Nah. There was no sign of him when I woke up. I ended up just outside of Iji,' he explained. 'Figured you guys would head back here at some point.'

That didn't make a lot of sense. 'That doesn't make much sense,' Raiku repeated for the benefit of those not dialed in to her thoughts. 'Who would go to all the trouble of trying to hurt some Konoha-nin and then... take the hard one?'

Daisukenojo raised his eyebrows. 'Good point.'

'Yeah, she's being acting weird all day,' Ryuu agreed. 'You all good in there, Speedy?'

Raiku rolled her eyes. 'Sure sure, it's hilarious that I can make valid points, ha ha. But seriously. Who would go to the trouble of capturing  _Yamada_ ,' here she gestured somewhere about a foot and a half above her head, indicating his general Yamada-ness, 'but just leave us out in the middle of nowhere? We'd be way easier to kill off, and that's what they were doing before. Just killing them.'

Daisukenojo tapped his chin thoughtfully. 'They might have killed him,' he pointed out. 'And then decided we weren't worth the trouble.'

Ryuu snorted. 'Yeah, right. And where's the massive site of destruction that would take? I've seen him get hit by actual lightning,' they both shot Raiku a frankly unwarranted look here, 'and walk away. Guy's a juggernaut.'

Yamada  _was_  a juggernaut. He was also a gifted fighter, a skilled strategist and, unlike the other people she had met today, not possessed of mysterious fail-field capabilities, a sentient Plot who had taken over a close friend, or a highly traumatised civilian who had gotten blood everywhere. Like a douchebag.

Yeah, actually, that was enough for one day.

'That's it!' she cried, putting a hand on each of them and shoving. 'I'm not doing this! I want to eat and then I want to sleep and we can deal with this in the morning!'

'Uh, we just got attacked by some random storm that neither of you two could sense and we still don't know where our teacher is,' Daisukenojo said with a frown. 'I think you can do without your beauty sleep for a while longer.'

'Anyone have a different plan?' she demanded. 'Anyone? Anyone have an idea about what to do next that isn't "get some sleep and regroup"?'

Ryuu looked away, shoving its hands in its pockets the way Ryuu always had when he felt defensive. Well-played, Plot, she thought.

'No? No. So, let's find some... abandoned backyard, set up camp and decide what to do in the morning.' She grabbed her pack where it was hanging off Daisuke's slightly larger one, slinging it over one shoulder. 'Ryuu, you get to sleep on the ground or share with Daisukenojo.'

'He absolutely does not share with Daisukenojo,' said redhead decried. 'Not a chance.'

Raiku spun on her heel decisively and started off down the winding path.

Get it. Winding. Because Iji literally meant—

Raiku's hilarious wordplay was interrupted by further bickering, the constant background soundtrack of her life.

Wow. Not  _one thing_  was going to go right today, she reflected wearily.


	65. consummate professionalism

It hadn't taken them long to set up a discreet camp, sheltered against the base of an overgrown outcropping outside the city limits. It was low, and quiet, and well-concealed.

And  _apparently_  Raiku couldn't be trusted to set it on fire until it was done, so she had been banished outside until they were finished setting it up.

Sulking, Raiku twisted a blade of grass between her fingers, absently tearing it into strips. She could make the best of this situation! Right. Bright side, she got this time to think. Downside, she had basically been put into time-out based on a  _mild_ incident in which no—

Well.

In which  _one_ person had been hurt, by their own hand no less! She twisted her lip. There was no point in dwelling on the incredibly unfounded banishment; she may as well get back to thinking.

 _One_ , she thought, making deliberate use of the mental verb; one weird thing could be an accident. It was possible that Daisukenojo had said eight, instead of nine. It was possible that she had misheard, that she'd been too distracted to focus properly. But twice? A second time, a second of blankness, of the Plot that was Ryuu stuck, trapped in time until the moment passed? That couldn't be a coincidence. The two things  _had_  to be connected.

A change in Plot could do it. Peripheral plots, like Ryuu's, were often fragile and poorly conceived. Her presence alone could be putting it on the defensive, forcing it to make sacrifices to keep the ground it had already gained. It wasn't fragile, though. She'd seen it slide over his skin; she'd seen it seep in through the pores and saturate him. It wasn't fragile, regardless of its relative universal insignificance.

Raiku tugged another piece of grass free from the ground and began to twist, long fingers tensing and tearing at it.

And then, the issue she had been skirting around. The man. The mental image of his face, sliding away even now.

Well, she reflected, what did she know? He wasn't a Gairano. He wasn't part of her family; the Genematrix shouldn't have been able to see him, not the way it saw-didn't-see the Gairano. It didn't see normal people properly as far as she knew; just perceived them as vehicles for events and messages. It barely respected her own fail-field enough to give her as wide a berth as it did. She had to duck its enthusiasm almost constantly, like many of the less talented Gairano.

But she had seen it. That hole in the shadow cast around their feet. She could still see that perfect circle of emptiness when she closed her eyes.

It went without saying that these events had to be connected somehow. Maybe because of a missing piece of the Plot; it had no Device except timing and location combining against Ryuu's backstory. It could be overextending itself in trying to keep as many options open as possible, and that could in turn be aggravating other storylines in the area. The narrative balance of the setting could be getting thrown off, the man in question falling out of a Plot Hole and then back into one as quickly as he'd come.

Plot Holes were a sore point for the Gairano; they played havoc with people's memories just as much as they did the fabric of the space-time continuum.

She frowned. It still didn't sit right with her. Even to start with, what narrative balance could there even be to disrupt? She had clearly kicked at least some of this off when she destroyed the other Plot, even if the criminal activity was the original cause. But to cause this much of a ripple? Iji was in the middle of nowhere and Naruto hadn't and wouldn't ever stray there. ...Well. At least if her father's meticulously mapped out storyline was accurate. That wasn't a given, obviously, but Iji would still only have been a brief interlude. There shouldn't be  _enough_  there for it to go wrong so spectacularly; it just didn't make any sense. But twice now she had seen examples of far too much free narrative potential going haywire. Worse yet, the idea that that much potential could be growing in this area, unchecked, even with a Gairano present? Her fail-field wasn't the strongest, but Konoha-nin passed through here all the time and there were enough Gairano in the profession that it should have been impossible without direct Naruto interference.

Raiku dusted off her hands and let them hang for a moment, forearms resting on her knees. And then there was her  _own_  emerging… pattern. Ordinarily it wouldn't have worried her; after all, she'd had involuntary flare-ups before, both reactionary and routine. Part of having that specific effect on electrons was a certain level of unpredictability, and part of having it to such an extent was the kind of mishap she'd been experiencing recently. But in the past they'd always had an obvious cause. Heightened emotional intensity, Plot proximity, hormonal changes; there was always  _something_. Sure, she was upset about Ryuu, but she hadn't been in any particular distress at the time of each power surge. In fact, she'd been the calmest she had been in days at the teahouse.

'You done? I think we've got enough to finish the camp,' Daisukenojo said, the better part of a log under each arm, jerking his head to gesture at their small makeshift rest area.

Raiku looked down and found that the grass at her feet was torn into perfectly equal strands. 'Yep,' she said, and she could easily pass off any strangeness in her tone as her usual idiosyncrasies. She dusted her hands off and got to her feet. 'Need any help?'

Daisukenojo snorted. 'We're not building a fire, remember?'

She simpered at him mockingly. He flashed her a tired grin, but stopped up short before he actually bent to enter their shelter. Raiku leaned around, assuming that Ryuu was there with a knife or something equally nostalgic.

'Hey,' Daisuke said suddenly, half-turning to face her. 'You'd tell me if there was something weird going on with Ryuu, right?' She realised he'd lowered his voice. A rare sign of The Serious Daisukenojo. 'If you knew about it.'

Raiku shot him a look that she knew was too openly cautious. 'Yeah,' she said. 'If I knew about it.' She couldn't see anything in his expression to give her a clue on how to proceed. 'Why, have you noticed something?'

How the hell could  _he_  have noticed something? That shouldn't be possible. The narrative sheen of all normal people, all non-Gairano, should have been patching that perception up before it ever got to Daisukenojo.

Daisukenojo shrugged, jostling the wood in his arms a little to settle it into a more comfortable position. 'Nothing specific. Something just feels...' He made a face. 'Off. And with everything that's happening, the last thing we want is more suspicious, inexplicable shit going on. This close to Rivers, especially.' The look he sent her was surprisingly pointed. He didn't know as much about what happened with Ryuu and his family, even what had happened years ago, but he clearly knew enough.

Raiku tapped her pointer finger against her thumb, hoping it would come off as thoughtful rather than stressed. She really had to stop forgetting that Daisukenojo could be observant when he wanted to be. They did test for it when assessing them at the Chuunin exams, but here she was yet again, surprised.  _God, Raiku,_ she admonished herself,  _why don't you just forget he's alive?_ She really had to do better. She made a promise, then and there, to pay at least thirty percent more attention to Daisukenojo.

She probably should have started right at that moment, though, because he'd already started talking again. 'Just. Keep an eye out for anything weird?'

She creased her eyes at him. 'Yeah. You got it.'

He nodded and ducked under the entrance they'd made, muttering something about like recognising like that she didn't care to examine too closely. Probably just something related to those Gairano rumours and not a personal statement about her. Definitely not.

She looked around for any  _more_ Plot before she followed him in, and saw nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

'Right.' Daisukenojo was always, somehow, the head of these little meetings. He sat cross-legged across from her, Ryuu making up the last point of the triangle as they brainstormed. 'Yamada is our top priority.'

Raiku nodded. 'Definitely.'

'So. I know you guys woke up somewhere else, but I was just back at camp after it all went crazy, and there was no sign of him,' Daisukenojo informed them.

'Are you sure?' Ryuu asked. 'Maybe you missed something.'

Daisuke glared. It was probably a testament to the seriousness of the matter at hand that this was the extent of his irritated response. 'Yep,' he gritted out. 'I'm sure. You wanna waste time going to check?'

'Maybe I do, are you going to stop me?'

'They've never abducted someone before, and they've been known to kill ANBU without issue,' Raiku pointed out, trying to get them back on track. 'We should keep in mind that he could be dead already.'

Daisuke settled back, folding his arms. 'True,' he admitted. 'But something feels off. This isn't their usual thing, right? Didn't they kill everyone before? I don't think anyone got out alive.'

She nodded. But it also hadn't found what it was looking for before then, if her musings were correct. A Plot, reaching out for traction and finding nothing, would starve and discard what it couldn't eat.

They couldn't be told that. Wouldn't understand, even if she did. Worse, it may not even be the real reason, if she had come to the wrong conclusion. There was just her best guess to go by, and she was doing it alone.

'We did suggest before that they might be looking for someone to capture and interrogate, trying to lure them out. Yamada does sort of stand out, if they were looking for someone who seems powerful.' Another irritatingly good point from Ryuu.

'There's not a lot of use in speculating without any evidence to go on,' Raiku concluded, already sick of this fast road to nowhere. 'We should look for evidence of disturbance. Better yet,' she added, jerking her head at Daisukenojo, 'we should send you around and see what you can sense. You're better at it than both of us.'

'Unless they can conceal themselves,' he countered, flushing. Possibly at the praise, possibly uncomfortable with their plan resting on his admittedly more advanced chakra abilities. Hard to tell, with that boy. 'In which case, you'd be better. You can sniff them out, chakra or no chakra.'

This earnt her a considering look from Ryuu that she didn't particularly enjoy. 'Anyway!' she said loudly. 'If we form a search pattern, we can at least establish familiarity with our environment. Worst case scenario, we still know our surroundings and can defend ourselves better when they come back!'

Daisukenojo grimaced. 'They  _do_  know the area better than we do…'

'Sounds like a plan,' Ryuu conceded. It and Daisukenojo exchanged reluctant looks.

Raiku glared. 'What, what's wrong with my plan?'

'We-ell,' Daisuke hedged. 'It's just that a lot of your plans end in… explosions and death.'

Raiku gasped. 'How— _how dare you_!'

'I'll take that way! Daisuke said, steamrolling over her injured sputtering and literally stepping over her just to add insult to injury. 'Bastard, you take that one.'

Raiku growled and got to her feet, brushing off the backs of her legs. Explosions, she'd show them explosions!

Or she. Wouldn't show them explosions? She would show them  _the most resounding lack of explosions_.

 

 

 

 

 

Forty minutes into her own search-slash-reconnaissance mission, Raiku was already regretting that promise. How bad could a single explosion be?

She swung around another tree trunk, seeing nothing and feeling precisely nothing in the way of metallic conductors. Not that she would find any, until the Plot summoned them from the  _goddamned abyss_. Or wherever it was keeping these enemies stockpiled.

She sighed.

She should have suggested that they burn the forest down. At least a little bit of it. Plot-abomination or not, Ryuu could have contained it before it got too bad, and they could have literally smoked them out!

She blew hair out of her face and cast her mind wider again. There was a river towards the east, and Iji still settled at the back of her brain, like the two points of a compass. This was for the best, since she ruined compasses without fail. There were those, and nothing else. Barring their camp, but most of the metal there was sitting with Daisukenojo. A much faster-moving point in her awareness.

Raiku had settled into a nice saunter when a sudden breeze warmed the air around her, a rush of warmth that would have made her furious on an already warm day had it not been so familiar.

It occurred to her that relying on Plot was enabling her to be the laziest she'd ever been in her life. Could it really be so easy? Think of Plot and it appeared?

 _Speak of the devil, right?_  she asked herself in a distinctly grumbling internal voice, before launching herself into the canopy to find Ryuu. It wasn't hard to locate; it'd gotten closer to her area that it should have and fake or not, any reasonable representation of Ryuu was liberally covered in metal killing objects.

Raiku landed on the branch next to it, dropping into an easy crouch. 'What is it?' she whispered.

Ryuu looked at her with an eyebrow raised. 'What?' he whispered back.

She nodded to prompt it, expression expectant. 'What did you find?' She quickly scanned the forest floor beneath them and found nothing of note.

Ryuu tilted its head quizzically.

Raiku frowned. 'If you didn't find anything, why did you call me here?' she asked, raising her voice now that it was clear whispering wasn't called for.

'I  _didn't_ ,' it said, looking at her like  _she_  was the one acting weird. She suppressed a hysterical giggle purely because it would only make things worse.

'Yes, you did,' she said, because the Plot would survive some correction and they had a  _system_ , damnit. 'You raised wind flow and temperature! Raise for Raiku, drop for Daisukenojo, that's how it's always been. It's alliterative and everything. It is the  _entire reason_  you are our early warning system.' Daisukenojo had cracked jokes about Ryuu and Raiku heating things up before Raiku had challenged him to a game of Mercy and burnt his eyebrows off, frying the fine hairs on the back of his hands. Later he had denied ever making that innuendo, so the team had admittedly gone on to pretend it never happened, but this just seemed negligent.

Ryuu turned to look at the forest for a moment, then waved a hand at her dismissively. 'No. I just wasn't thinking.'

Raiku gaped. 'You weren't—you weren't  _thinking_? Who the hell are you?' she blurted out, reflexive, a query meant for someone who wasn't there anymore.

Ryuu didn't notice her falter, the way her expression darkened. Or it didn't seem to, anyway. 'We have a lot going on,  _Raiku_ ,' it said tersely. 'Excuse me for wanting to be a little more comfortable.'

'You exist in a state of perpetual discomfort,' Raiku pointed out, just for the thrill of perverse pleasure at correcting the thing. 'You are characterised by only being comfortable when someone else is miserable, it's like your zen state.'

Ryuu shot her a glare.

She raised her hands. 'Sorry, sorry. If you haven't found anything, I'll get back to my own area.' She sent him a quick salute and straightened, stretching her back just to hear it crack, and leaping away.

Or pretending to, anyway.

Actually she swung around another branch and pressed down out of sight, slowing her breathing and keeping her ears pricked. There was no way the Plot had this kind of stamina. This had to mean it was up to something, Ryuu wouldn't make mistakes like that. No matter how bad the story was.

She heard it sigh.

'This can't go on,' it muttered. 'We have to do something.'

Raiku rolled her eyes. Brooding, apparently. Nothing she could use. Just enough to raise its Drama quotient, which wasn't a good sign for her. If it was trying to build up steam again, even without a Device to re-trigger the Plot she'd accidentally crushed, it could still initiate with enough momentum. On the one hand, she needed it to do something. On the other, if it got too big, it could take her or Daisukenojo down with it.

Or Yamada. Raiku grimaced. She almost felt sorry for whoever had Yamada.  _If_  they had him, and he wasn't just… frozen, somewhere.

Frozen in place, eyes staring at nothing.

She shook her head and blinked hard. She shouldn't think about that. She crept around the branch instead, ducking around to get a good look at wherever Ryuu's Plot shadow might be. Surely the Brooding would kick it into gear, right? Or at least make it start looking for a way forward?

She narrowed in on it and discreetly fist-pumped.  _Yes_. It had elongated along the forest floor, stretching out almost wire-thin into the distance. And back towards her searching radius, as well.

She was tempted to click her heels together, but she was a consummate professional and only allowed some cheerful scampering from branch to branch as she followed the line of darkness in the dirt, stretching to the next vulnerability in the Plot's progression.

 

 

 

 

 

It took more time than she would have expected for it to lead her anywhere. It seemed to loop back in on itself three or four times, hurtling away into the underbrush just when she thought it was slowing down. She'd sprung out of nowhere on poor Daisukenojo, whose shriek would definitely have alerted any enemies in the area had fate not clearly had other plans. Eventually it slowed to a crawl in a clearing, and pooled in its customary waiting position.

Raiku kicked back on a tree branch and waited.

And then waited some more.

And then some more.

And then it became obvious that Raiku just wasn't built for that kind of mental endurance. She wasn't the most patient at the best of times, but when she started to sweat under what was probably the noonday sun—when she had bounced out of bed at  _dawn_ —that was a bit too much to tolerate.

She swung down from the tree branch and stalked over to the Plot, standing over it with her hands on her hips.

It had the decency to shy slightly from her fail-field. Slightly. She hovered near it, torn between uncertainty and irritation.

She could get the gist if she got close enough, just…  _super_ close.

She eyed it. It wobbled non-threateningly.

Raiku glared and stepped back. Oh no. It wasn't getting her that way. Close?  _Non-threatening?_  She snorted in contempt at its feeble attempt at trickery. She turned her nose up at it pointedly, because ha! It wasn't going to get her  _that_ way. She turned to walk away and another patch of blackness glimmered at her from the ground where she had been about to put her foot. She squawked and hopped back on one foot, clasping her knee to her chest protectively. 'How dare you!' she yelped. 'What do you think you're doing?!'

She awkwardly swivelled in place, managing to do this mostly through core strength and sheer bloody-mindedness. She cast her eyes around to find a clear path away.

The Plot wove around her, doing a strange taunt in abstract symbols, ink flooding and receding across the soil.

Raiku huffed impatiently. 'You know we're not going to do this!' she called warningly. She pulled one hand off her knee to gesture for emphasis. 'You  _know_  I'm not going to fall for this!'

'You seem like you might fall in general, though,' a male voice said thoughtfully.

Raiku huffed again and swivelled, doing the awkward in-place shuffle. She managed to get herself facing the other way just for the Plot to ripple, to shudder across the ground and start drawing away. A black tide, pulling back from the start of the treeline.

Her leg dropped to leave her standing on both feet.

The man from Iji, the man who was neither young nor old, knocked on the tree beside him in a caricature of good manners. 'Hello,' he said. 'I was hoping to speak with you.'

Raiku could feel her skin stretching tight over her face, lips stretching over bared teeth so wide that it hurt, not a smile but a signal of aggression and raw, painful hostility.

He tilted his head. 'Is now a good time?' he asked politely.

Raiku found herself mirroring the tilt of her head when she realised her neck had twinged, the muscles so tense that the movement hurt.

He gestured to the nothing in front of them. 'My name is Tsuji. Spelt for "crossroad",' he added, like she would ever need to write his name down. 'I think I gave you the wrong impression earlier.'

Raiku scoured his features for something she could use to remember him by. Asymmetry. Scars. Freckles. Anything. She drank him in with hungry eyes and found nothing.

'What may I call you?' he asked, maintaining that same curiously polite tone. Something about it made the memory rise, unbidden, of learning to write a letter. Doing something she'd only read about.

Raiku realised she'd been standing too still, poised to attack. Eyes tracing him when he moved but readying herself without ever having made the decision to do so.

He smiled, eyes too wary to pull it off. It made the expression awkward, almost a grimace. She wondered idly if hers was like that, if it would be if she tried.

He frowned instead when she didn't respond. 'So we'll get right to it then. What do you see?' he asked bluntly, politeness dropping in that nothing voice, those  _nothing_  eyes really taking her in now. 'How did you get out?'

Raiku was too tense to answer by then, muscles almost vibrating under the strain. She couldn't unclench her jaw enough to speak.

There was something in his face, a flash of something she couldn't identify but that made her gut twist in response. In symmetry. 'Are there more like you? Like us?' he asked slowly, each word careful and distinct and heavy in a way she wished she understood.

'There is no "us",' Raiku got out through gritted teeth. Even the word, that connection however tenuous that stretched from her to her family, that connection he was trying to sniff out—even  _that_  felt too sharp, too close to shattering on her teeth before she could spit it out. A predator sniffing at the door and she sat there praying-mute  _there's nothing here for you,_  even as it started to dig.

He tilted his head. 'You and I can see it,' he pointed out, tone nothing but reasonable, the echo of claws scraping against hardwood. 'We came from somewhere.'

She managed to force the snarl down just enough to respond. 'We are not the same,' she told him. 'We are nothing alike.'

He considered this, eyes heavy-lidded as he looked into the distance. 'How did you pull the threads loose?' he asked after a while, evidently deciding that line of discussion wasn't going to be productive.

'What  _threads_?' Raiku asked, baring her teeth again and wishing the mask wasn't on. Wishing he could see the sparks in her teeth and understand, and know what she would do to him. This wasn't going to go well and she knew it. He wasn't one of them, narrative awareness or no. He was—he was  _something_ , but he wasn't a member of her  _family,_ and the Gairano had spent generations honing a shared vocabulary specifically so that the  _causal weave of the universe_ could be discussed over dinner. He didn't know that, didn't know any of that, hadn't been socialised the way he should have as a relative of theirs. He could have been talking about a Plot, or a Character, or a Device or any number of a hundred things her family had developed efficient means of communicating amongst themselves.

He gestured around them; suddenly paranoid, Raiku scanned the area for Plot.

Nothing. Nothing since it had fled from him.

When she looked back, he was watching her. 'Those threads,' he said.

Raiku stared back for a moment in bewilderment, before something in the front of her brain seemed to snap shut, a slamming down of the protective wall training had carefully instilled against any unwelcome emotional expression. It puzzled her for a moment, because

oh.

Raiku struggled to maintain that blankness as the realisation started to fully penetrate; as an unpleasantness, an idea like nausea started forming, something it had occurred to some shinobi part of her long before the rest, because  _oh._

This was so much worse than she'd thought.

'I see them,' she said eventually, making sure her tone stayed even. 'Of course I understand.'

He nodded, something she hadn't realised was tense in his shoulders relaxing minutely. 'You've been pulling them loose. How do you do that?'

Raiku's anger was freezing over, turning brittle, fragile around the edges, because there were no Plots around them anymore. Plots were likely too smart to come into a space with this much fail-field and  _this,_  now, this was bad. This was really, really bad.

'You've been the only one who can see them for a long time, haven't you?' she asked, trying to avoid his intense, unblinking stare, trying to keep her tone neutral.

He tilted his head and she knew that feeling, that cold sinking feeling of having made a mistake. 'Yes,' he agreed, the far-off look taking on a shrewd edge. 'Why do you ask?'

Raiku had spent her life with a context for what she saw, a framework to understand it with and it had  _still_  almost killed her a thousand times, had twisted her mind into knots in the dark. This man, with none of that, with stories coming to life all around him and people who couldn't see them, couldn't understand what was happening to them as that darkness took over their lives. Those threads, those whatever he saw them as, dragging people to where they wanted them.

Gairano children were always raised in at home. There were no exceptions, and they could still be lost.

He changed tactics. It was good, she had to admit; wait until her eyes skipped to something else, a sure sign of the brain refocusing, then try to mirror her own sympathies. If she hadn't been raised by Gairano Chitose, she would never have known. 'I'm going to kill your friend,' he told her gently. 'You know it isn't him anymore.'

Raiku felt her breath catch on an agreement, her neck tense against a nod, because yes, Ryuu had to die. It couldn't be allowed to do this to him. She knew that.

Except that she  _didn't_ , some part of her said, in a voice so far down it felt like bones shifting. She knew Ryuu was gone and she knew what was left had to die, but these were upwards thoughts, the rational part of her brain ticking over, and deep down there was just the blue-white- _hungry_  fingers stretching across her family, their faces, her burnt fingerprints scorched across her mind's eye and Gairano weren't possessive, they weren't, because the Gairano  _knew_  that they just kept borrowed time but

_they aren't yours_

the thought thrummed down her spine, the resonance of her thoughts with every physical atom of her, because Raiku was  _bad_  at being a Gairano and always had been, and

_they're_ _**mine** _ _._

Raiku knew that Tsuji could kill Ryuu, that he would vanish and she'd never hear from this twisted, impossible man again, and she could let Ryuu go, then. She could let him go, once his heart stopped beating. It would be a win for everyone. She knew that the abomination was just wearing his skin, that it had stolen his whole life, that it would be gone and there would be nothing there rubbing her failure in her face.

But,

 _that's_ _ **mine**_.

She couldn't. She couldn't uncurl her fingers where they were digging into her palms, couldn't force her consent past her throat where she was choking on it. She couldn't just give Ryuu away, not even this half-Ryuu, this grim puppet that just stood as a testament to just how bad a Gairano she really was. She could stomach killing Ryuu herself, could have done it that second if it had been there ready for her, but for some reason she just didn't understand, this man offered to do it for her and it was all she could do not to—

'You touch any of them,' she said, in a voice gone raspy from the strain, 'and I'll kill you.'

The air between them was getting brighter, the shadows on his face more pronounced. There was a cage of lightning in her chest and it was shining through her skin, violent and bright and blinding. Plot was gathering again at their periphery; she could see its sickly shine, brightness on oil.

'I was wondering,' he said eventually, 'why you hadn't killed them yet. But that's not what I should have been asking, is it?'

He sighed.

He looked at her with something like pity. 'It must be hard. Things would have been simpler before.'

Raiku bit back a snarl. 'Yes,' she snapped. 'Things were a lot easier before fate  _ate my teammate_  and  _you_  showed up.'

'I mean now that you have to think about it, you have to choose,' he said, tilting his head, looking at her closer than she would ever have wanted. 'Choose who to hurt. Choose what to take away.'

Raiku was dizzy, then, a sudden tear ripping open in her chest,

 _it is_ , it said,

 _what?_ she thought,

'No,  _no_ , not yet!' Tsuji cried, voice cracking with frustration when the tidal wave of darkness surged back to fill the void he had created and she

opened her eyes to see Ryuu staring down at her.

She blinked rapidly.

Blinked some more.

'Are you alright?' it asked softly, giving her a wary look while she reached a hand up to rub grit from her eyes, trying to understand what she was seeing. 'You were…' It waved a hand. 'Crackling.'

Raiku wet her lips, tasting copper. She tried to blink the sleep out of her eyes, to orient herself. To situate herself in the dark, and Ryuu's blue-lit face. She saw the roof of their improvised shelter. She could hear Daisukenojo's distinct snoring pattern, because he snored adorably and in a puppy-like way that he refused to acknowledge.

'What?' she asked, voice husky with sleep. 'Where am I?'

She couldn't see Tsuji. She was not sitting in a room across from him. But he had been real. He had been there. Her imagination wasn't good enough to fabricate him. She lunged up into a seated position. 'Where is he?!' she demanded.

Ryuu was already on his feet and crouching awkwardly in a shelter too short for him to fully stand in. He was a few steps back, hands lifted cautiously to ward her off. 'Who, who are you talking about?'

She clawed at her face in frustration, mostly to avoid going for Ryuu's before it was time to rip it off. 'Tsuji! I was just in the forest, and he—'

'Raiku, we got back hours ago, you're still dreaming!' it exclaimed, while Daisukenojo made the discontented noises of someone woken by Raiku's hysterical screams.

Raiku hissed at him. In retrospect, she would conclude this was a needlessly ostentatious display.

At the time she did it, it just felt satisfying. It had the added benefit of jumping Daisukenojo into full wakefulness.

'Raiku!' Ryuu snapped. 'Hey! What are you talking about?' She reeled from the sudden contact to either side of her face, jerking back but held fast by the grip there before realised it had just taken hold of her face.

'What the hell do you think you're—' she stopped, eyes widening.

It was looking right at her, irritated but guileless. Its naked palms pressed to the exposed skin of her face like it was normal, like it had no reason to be afraid, and Ryuu, Ryuu even when he'd been everything else she could think of,

_lying fighting hurting loyal_ _**vicious** _

had never been guileless.

Raiku stared past the hands braced on either side of her face, the gentle pressure that threatened to crush her, and she said,

'You're not Ryuu,'

Like a revelation, or a prayer. Some form of higher insight, suddenly revealed.

It stared back at her, something flickering in its gaze.

'Raiku, what are you doing?' Daisukenojo asked carefully, somewhere behind her. 'What are you talking about?'

She could feel how wide her eyes were, how they burned from her unblinking stare, but,

'You're not Ryuu,' she repeated. 'You never were.'

Raiku reached up and grasped it by the wrists, fingertips suddenly crackling with energy, the thing crying out and dropping to its knees. It tried to yank away but its muscles had already locked, her fingers wrapping around to trap its own in her grip. 'Tell me who you are,' she told it, almost distantly, mind lit up and hurtling through everything she'd seen, everything she'd missed.

It glared up at her, from a face just enough like Ryuu's to make it hurt, clear enough in reality now to seem unreal. 'What are you talking about?!' it gritted out. Its whole face taut with pain. 'What's wrong with you now?!'

She looked down at it, incredulity and something like lightness swelling in her chest for the first time since the whole damn thing had started. 'You're not Ryuu,' she repeated just to hear herself say it again, relief cracking her voice open mid-sentence.

It narrowed its— _his_ —eyes, and closed its mouth. Its yellow eyes, so like his, but just too warm. Just too amber, too warm-blooded. Too human around the edges to hide behind the Plot, now.

Raiku stood over it, and started to smile with her wide eyes and her white teeth, her fingers digging in more than hard enough to bruise where skin wasn't already splitting open. It was bleeding red and not black, now. It was real enough to bleed. She smiled wider when it flinched, when blood started to pool around her fingertips. 'Tell me where he is.'

'Raiku,' Daisukenojo said slowly behind her, and the thing shook his head slowly. 'What's going on?'

'This isn't Ryuu,' she said, fingers digging in until they felt hot, until she felt flesh give under her nails, the tremors in his rigid arms. 'He's been pretending, they took him before they ever got Yamada.' She could smell blood, a sharp metallic note through the rising smell of ozone. ' _Look at me_.'

His eyes flicked towards her once, twice, then held.

Raiku nodded, still seized by that light, almost beatific feeling. 'Tell me where he is.'

His eyes narrowed, but she could see where his jaw was clenching, teeth forced together under the current. She could feel his nerves, could see them laid out like she was walking across them, pouring herself through the endings in his skin.

'Raiku, hand him over to me,' Daisukenojo said, quiet but firm. She looked away from her captive slowly, each turn away from him feeling unnatural, each deflection from the circuit she was completing with her hands.

Daisukenojo didn't look shocked anymore. His gaze was steady, his tone was measured, and she could trust that face.

Her grip tightened convulsively.

'Toaster, he can't talk like that,' Daisukenojo said cautiously. 'He gets it. You have to stop now.'

She was trembling, Raiku realised distantly. Not with stress, or excitement. Because Daisukenojo was telling her to stop and he was right there, the Plot was finally something flesh enough for her to  _hurt,_  and he was saying no.

She stared into Daisukenojo's eyes, unblinking.

Eventually, she dropped the false Ryuu unceremoniously, the imposter falling to the ground and immediately gasping for air, convulsing. She took a reluctant step back.

'Just. Let me do it, okay?' Daisukenojo said, putting himself between her and the imposter. 'I'll take care of this. He's not going anywhere.'

Raiku nodded numbly.

He tentatively reached out and touched her shoulder. 'Just leave it to me.'

She nodded again, unable to tear her eyes from the floor. The world crept back in.

She felt cold.


	66. shoplifting the cardinal beasts

His name was Byakko, he was almost seventeen years old and Raiku was reasonably sure that two days earlier, he hadn't existed.

She watched him, fascinated. This was made easy by how Daisukenojo had swiftly and definitely overdone the restraints.

He was also, apparently, Ryuu's evil twin.

'Who the hell has an evil twin?' Daisuke asked eventually, from where he'd been sitting next to her in silence for almost an hour. She shrugged, unable to look away from Byakko's face.

She was certain that the scar through his eyebrow, Ryuu's scar, would have matched down to the millimetre if she got close enough to check. But his eyes were slightly rounder at the edges, enough to soften Ryuu's sharp glare. His pupils were rounder somehow too, set in warmer eyes. He had thicker, paler eyelashes. His ears were indefinably different. Tiny, tiny differences, enough now to make a whole new person.

Would she have noticed, she wondered, if the Plot hadn't distracted her from the details of him immediately? If Ryuu had always had a twin, if the Plot hadn't conjured or constructed one for him in a last-ditch effort to keep the right amount of narrative potency in place, would she have been in a better position to notice the swap? If she hadn't touched the wrong thing at the wrong time, had Tsuji never come to Iji, would there just be empty space here?

It had always been a sort of abstract thing; this causal weave that, even when it attached to her or bent around the invisible shape of a Device, just made patterns. It had never seemed real enough, physical enough, to make a person out of  _nothing_.

Byakko met her gaze, his own far too steady for someone both bleeding and, frankly, gratuitously restrained.

'Who the hell,' Daisuke continued, his voice getting louder, 'gets replaced by  _their own evil twin_?'

Raiku nodded dumbly. Even for the Genematrix, even for a Genematrix she had accidentally spurred into a flurry, this was not a good day for narrative.

Byakko raised his eyebrows. Raiku jerked back before she could restrain the impulse. On Ryuu, that expression meant he'd asked a question he already knew the answer to and was preparing to be mean about it. On Byakko, who knew?

'In all fairness,' said evil twin pointed out, 'I didn't abduct him.'

'Do you think we're going to trust  _anything_  that Ryuu's evil twin tells us?' Daisuke demanded, raising his voice. The implication of that hit them both at once. When she turned to him, his face was white beneath the freckles. 'Ryuu has an evil twin,' he whispered.

Darkness threatened to creep in around the corners of Raiku's vision. After a moment of her lungs burning, she realised this revelation had actually driven the air out of her chest.

 _Ryuu_  had an evil twin.

They turned to look back at Byakko as a single, horrified unit.

He huffed.

Yes. Yep. Okay. Yep. Raiku nodded once, decisively.

Okay.

'We're killing him.'

She was halfway around the fire, knife already drawn by the time Daisukenojo managed to catch her around the knees and stop her.

'Raiku, no! We need him to talk!'

She struggled against his grip, half-waddling in place where he'd trapped her legs. Byakko was wriggling away as best he could, inching along as fast as possible when bound so effectively.

'Stay the hell away!'

'He's  _evil Ryuu!_  He has to die!' Raiku yelped, finally losing balance and crashing to the ground. Doggedly, she started pulling herself and by extension, Daisukenojo, along the ground with her arms.

'We need him to tell us where Ryuu is! They still have Yamada!' Daisukenojo struggled, trying to drag her back. 'Ah! No shocking! No shocking!' His voice jumped up about half an octave when the crackling started. 'None of that!'

'I'll tell you anything you want if you keep her away from me,' Byakko told Daisukenojo urgently, leaning as far away from Raiku as he could. 'Keep her away!' His amber eyes were wide.

Wide with…

'Are you afraid of me?' she asked with real interest, propped up on her elbows.

'Of course he's afraid of you! You tried to kill him  _twice_  now!'

Byakko's eyes stayed fixed right on her.

'Fine. If we're not going to kill him,' Raiku said, pulling her legs free from Daisuke's suddenly slack grip, 'then we can at least use him to find out where the real Ryuu is.'

'I can't believe this is even happening,' Daisuke grumbled, getting to his feet as well. 'Fucking…  _evil twins_.'

Byakko narrowed his eyes again when Raiku had settled a safe distance away, ostentatiously showing him her empty hands to indicate how incredibly harmless they were.

Daisuke gestured for Byakko to speak, which he did with a mutinous look. 'We took him from Iji when the three of you separated. Gairano ran off after something and we managed to get Seiryu,'

'Seiryu?' Raiku interrupted. 'Like. The dragon? Wait, like Byakko and Seiryu the great beasts?'

The look Byakko gave her was so venomous that her eyes almost watered trying to hold his gaze. 'Yes. That's his  _name_. Apparently you people weren't exactly subtle when you decided to rename him.'

'But your parents—what kind of naming convention is that?' she pushed incredulously. Sure, Byakko hadn't actually existed seventeen years ago, but naming twins after two great cardinal beasts? That was a lot of pressure to put on a child, even if you had a matching set. Had the Plot just… retconned Ryuunosuke's birth name? Rough.

'I would have loved the chance to ask them about it myself,' Byakko said, smiling thinly.

Raiku winced.

'Anyway,' he continued, looking back at Daisukenojo. 'We did the trade in Iji, since we failed to contact him properly three years ago—'

' _Contact_ —you set an ambush for us by summoning a hurricane and tried to murder a cross-nation squad!' Raiku burst out. She'd quietly resolved to stop interrupting, but she'd broken a lot of promises to herself recently. 'You basically enacted an action movie! And you were  _the bad guys!'_

'We're not supervillains,' Byakko said with an eyeroll, where Ryuu would have glared. 'We just wanted a chance to talk to him. To tell him the truth. We sent him messages, but your village has been on high alert since that invasion.'  _That you deserved_ , his expression clearly implied.

'You say you're not supervillains, but your family literally just replaced our teammate with what basically amounts to his evil clone,' Daisuke pointed out.

'I'm not evil!' Byakko snapped. 'Stop saying that! Not all twins have an evil and a good twin! We're not the ones  _abducting babies_  and murdering their families!'

Yet another good point that she fully intended to ignore. 'Wait. But even if you did just want to talk to him, why would we believe that after you tried to kill us all those years ago?" Raiku asked. It had been niggling at the back of her brain.

Byakko gave her a look so incredulous it bordered on hysterical. Really, that was uncalled-for, given how reasonable her question was. 'We weren't  _trying_  to kill you, we were trying to distract you while my uncle Zeshin talked to him. We didn't care about  _you._  Also, I want to point out, we're not the ones who blew up the forest!  _And_  you killed four of us!'

They both shot Raiku a look, because yes. That… had happened. 'Well,' she said, voice bland, 'you probably shouldn't have distracted us by attacking, should you?'

She became aware of her inner voice doing some familiar internal screaming.

'But we're getting off-topic,' she said quickly. 'So you must have known we were coming this way and,' she stopped. 'Wait, were you the ones killing people from Konoha?' she demanded.

Byakko sent her a flat look. 'If we were, would I tell you?'

Raiku moved to stand and he leaned back again. 'We were not!' he said immediately, as if he had always meant to answer her question. 'But I would be lying if I said it wasn't convenient for us.'

'So you just... took him?' she asked, scratching the back of her neck. It basically sounded like shoplifting at this stage. They'd walked into Iji with a lower value version of their item and walked out with the original under-arm. They had done the story equivalent of  _shoplifting Ryuu_. It would have been funny under any other circumstances.

'How the hell did you manage that, anyway?' Daisukenojo asked slowly, folding his arms. 'Much as I hate him, the asshole's sort of.' He cast a quick, self-conscious look at Raiku. 'Y'know.' He waved a hand. 'Terrifying.'

Raiku gaped at the admission.

'It was more… difficult than we expected,' Byakko allowed. 'But we were prepared after last time, and he doesn't actually know any of our real techniques. We were honestly more worried about dealing with you three; the teacher or  _you_  in particular,' he added, jerking his head at Raiku.

'So, everyone but me?' Daisukenojo asked, more than a little petulant before he got promptly steamrolled by Raiku.

'Me? You guys have a huge advantage over me! I use electricity!' She made a fist with one hand and then pushed it down with the other, held in an open palm. 'Electricity loses to wind, every time. Everyone knows that.'

'Yes,' Byakko said slowly, as if she were the idiot who didn't understand  _basic chakra types_ , 'that's true when it's chakra techniques, but I have no idea what you're doing. It's not chakra.'

Shit, how the hell had he noticed that?

'No, no,' she said after a moment, gesturing decisively. 'Ryuu always beats me. Wind trumps, how do you explain how that still works?'

Byakko shook his head. 'We don't fully understand what he's been doing either. We use techniques and channelling methods to make use of our bloodline affinity. As far as we can tell, he's been purely feeling his way through, so it doesn't look anything like the normal discipline. We've never seen anyone do things the way he does.'

Daisukenojo groaned and rubbed his face. 'Of course he'd be some sort of goddamn freak, even for this team. It's never easy with that guy.'

'But he's still using chakra,' Raiku sputtered. 'How is it not a technique?!'

'He's  _barely_  using chakra,' Byakko shot back irritably. 'How have you never noticed?'

'Don't even, not with her,' Daisuke said, flapping a hand in her direction.

'This is all super fascinating, but why take Yamada?' Raiku asked, settling back on her hands with a huff. 'He'd have to be way more trouble than he's worth.'

Byakko settled back as well, his face taking on an eerily familiar mulish expression. Shit. That never meant anything good on Ryuu.

'You did get his fingers, right?' she muttered to Daisukenojo, who nodded. He had also tensed, so at least it wasn't just her.

'Look. Just tell us where your goddamn people are and we'll go in, trade you for Ryuu and Yamada and leave. No more questions, no more... Y'know. Torture,' Daisukenojo said, jerking his head at Raiku in what she felt was a deeply unjustified reference to her tendency to harm people specifically to… encourage information sharing and… behaviour modification.

…Wait a second,  _holy shit_.

While Raiku parsed through this realisation, staring in bewilderment at the fire she'd made purely to ease some stress, Byakko growled. 'I'm not taking you two anywhere. You'll be attacked, and  _this_  one,' he looked pointedly at Raiku, 'will kill me out of spite.'

'They won't attack us if you send a message ahead,' Daisuke persisted. 'I know you can do that. It was the first thing Ryuu ever figured out, you guys must have it on lock.'

'First thing other than the choking,' Raiku muttered. Then she snapped her fingers. Brooding, huh? 'Hey, yes! You were doing that earlier! The message, not the choking.'

Byakko settled back again. Cat-like. They'd  _really_  leaned into the symbolism there, she marvelled. Given how freshly developed Byakko was, the Genematrix must have been thanking its lucky stars that Ryuu had always been a predatory bastard.

'No,' Byakko said eventually. 'I'm not leading you to my family. Not after what you people have already done to us.'

Raiku frowned. 'Hey, I am barely older than Ryuu, it's not like I stole him! Or Daisuke!'

Daisukenojo coughed and leaned into her space. 'You did kill four members of his family,' he mumbled.

Raiku elbowed him away and stood. She was tired. She was so hungry her stomach felt like it had turned itself inside out. More than anything, she was confused. She was pretty sure Tsuji had known all this beforehand and had been—what, trying to trick her? Trying to gain her sympathy? Doing  _god knew what_ , with his nothing-eyes and that line pulled taut in his voice.

She'd had enough. She was going to do what she had been suggesting since day one. 'I'm not doing this anymore,' she told them both, yanking one glove off. 'I'm burning the forest down.' She yanked the other glove off with her teeth and started rolling up her sleeves decisively.

Daisukenojo threw out a hand. 'No, no, we're not doing that!'

'See, she's insane!' Byakko exclaimed.

Daisukenojo groaned. 'Raiku, would you stop suggesting that, you're freaking him out!'

'Look! We're either burning the forest down and taking them all down with it or you're taking us to your family. If Ryuu comes with us willingly, we'll take him. If he  _wants_  to stay,' she added meaningfully, making almost painfully direct eye contact with Byakko, 'we'll leave. We'll take Yamada and go. No killing anyone.' A cliché; exactly what the Plot would be looking for right now. An _evil twin?_  Obviously it wasn't trying too hard for originality here. It was trying to reach a conclusion so this would all be a neatly-contained little arc, with minimal interference with Naruto's. Any quick solution she would give it, it was likely to take.

And Tsuji would be likely to see, she thought before she could stop herself.

She could see Daisuke slowly turning to face her again in her periphery, and she solved the problem of enduring his incredulous stare by pretending it wasn't happening. Even if she couldn't rely on the Plot with Tsuji lurking, Ryuu wouldn't  _want_  to stay. Ryuu hadn't been compliant once in his life. And to stay with people who had literally replaced him with another version? That wouldn't play into his complexes  _at all_.

Her and Byakko stared at each other through the flames. She tapped her foot impatiently. 'Well? This or we find it ourselves. With fire.'

'Fire or not, you won't find it without me,' Byakko told her, eyes glinting, the fire reflecting off the amber irises to make his name suddenly seem all too appropriate. 'We've gotten a lot more careful since the last time your people  _visited_.'

Before Raiku could seriously consider going back to the torture option, he slowly inclined his head. 'But I can agree to those terms. Let me go and we'll make this happen.'

Daisukenojo startled Raiku so much when he laughed that she almost sent sparks out. 'We're not letting  _Ryuu's evil twin_  go! Are you insane?!' he laughed loudly. Too loudly. Too long. After almost a solid minute, Raiku realised this was Daisuke's own form of hysteria, which was less destructive but a lot more unsettling than hers. She patted him on the back awkwardly.

'There, there,' she said hesitantly. 'Let it out.' She tried not to catch Byakko's eye, but he was clearly resigned to being at least maimed by what looked like a squad of lunatics.

After a few minutes, Daisukenojo's hard laughter turned to a sort of pathetic wheeze. Raiku proudly credited this to her attempt at consolation, though he shrugged her off when he finally managed to get his breathing under control.

Byakko, who had also waited patiently, shifted in a way that implied he was waggling his fingers where they were bound behind his back. 'Hidden to everyone but my family. Get it? The bloodline limit? I need my hands.'

Daisukenojo let out a muffled giggle that he quickly masked with a cough. 'Tell you what, man,' he said, husky voice even raspier from the unexpected vocal exercises. 'I've got a compromise.'

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku drummed her fingers on her bicep, arms folded across her chest. 'I feel like this plan puts a lot of pressure on me to succeed,' she said to Daisukenojo.

Daisukenojo grinned, too obviously proud of himself for her to really want to crush his dreams. 'Are you kidding?' He waved a hand at Byakko. 'How the hell are you  _not_  gonna keep track of him when he's strung up like this?'

Byakko sighed.

This, like any movement he made now, produced glimmers of light.

'What's to stop him from just pulling it all off?' she pointed out.

Daisukenojo waved a hand again. 'What, all of that before you can catch him? Not without losing all his fingers.'

Byakko squirmed a bit. 'Can we get a move on? This isn't exactly comfortable.'

'Yeah, I can see how this would feel a bit awkward,' Raiku said with grudging sympathy. Byakko flashed an arm at her pointedly, it and all his other limbs now wrapped strategically with razor wire thinly coated with chakra. It shone, making both Raiku and Daisukenojo squint. It also made him burn in the forefront of her mind, which was the point.

'Could you not?' Daisukenojo asked, batting Byakko's arm back down. 'This way you can't leave either of us behind. It's safer than whatever she had planned.'

Byakko nodded, but the glare he sent Raiku seemed a little less wary than it had before. It couldn't last, she thought wistfully; she just wasn't very frightening, especially once she stopped actively threatening death. She waggled her still-bare fingers at him, just to see if it helped.

He frowned. 'I don't feel safe. I feel like I'm one chakra slip-up away from losing a limb.'

'Accurate,' Daisukenojo agreed. 'Now, let's get started.'

Byakko stepped in front of them and shook his shoulders free of tension, before stilling.

The forest around them swayed in the darkness, leaves rustling. The night air was cool, a welcome reprieve. It felt good on her overcharged skin and she closed her eyes for a moment, before the dragging force that was Byakko's wires moved forward. He strode confidently into the dark forest, the two Chuunin following behind him. Daisukenojo reached out to grip Raiku's elbow, in what she briefly assumed was an act of support and then quickly realised was to make sure he could use her natural luminescence to see where he was going.

Byakko stopped abruptly, making Raiku tense, but he just stood in stillness with his head tilted, like he was listening to something. He lifted one hand by his side, long fingers stretching out to feel something she couldn't see.

The wind rustled. He adjusted more to the east and set off again.

'What the hell is he doing?' Daisukenojo muttered, his voice too rough and loud in the silence. Raiku shrugged, trusting that he could feel the motion through her arm and just followed after.

She couldn't see enough. Every now and again the dim glow of her eye caught on Plot blackness slipping through the trees, a flash of oil-slick tracing in the dark after Byakko, trying to pull them behind.

What was it even doing, she wondered; she had discovered Byakko, but it remained. Would it drag Ryuu and him together, to destroy each other? Or would it corrupt Ryuu, push him to kill his team and strike against Konoha? A less important Sasuke, there to fill time until the real thing came back?

Or was this Tsuji and his threads, poised like a spider to watch and see who fell through?

She stopped when Byakko shushed them from ahead, head cocked and hand raised. 'No,' he said suddenly, his eyes closed.

Raiku jerked back, panicked for a moment that he had somehow heard what she was thinking. She opened her mouth to speak but Byakko shushed her again, then shook his head with his eyes still closed.

She frowned. 'I'm  _really_  loving this cryptic clan stuff,' she muttered to Daisukenojo. He nodded, eyes fixed on Byakko.

'I'm sorry,' Byakko said to the air, a crease appearing between his eyebrows. The wind blew his hair over his face and she almost caught the sound of that no one, a low hum that slid across her ears before dissolving into nothing again. 'I don't have many options. You know that. I'm sorry.'

'Is this what it looks like when my mother's telling me off?' Daisukenojo asked quietly.

'No-o,' she whispered, 'he's not cowering.'

Daisukenojo opened his mouth, then sort of shrugged. That's right, she thought; he couldn't really argue with that.

Byakko abruptly turned and walked off into the dark again, ducking under a low branch in his path.

The two remaining members of Team Yamada followed after, jogging a few steps to close distance.

They walked on in the darkness, their now-silent guide dragging her forwards by the conductors over his skin, a compass facing true north as long as she didn't think about what he had been created from too strongly. The leaves rustling in the wind weren't soothing anymore. Every other moment brought a susurrus of voices she didn't know, too quiet to hear properly, too quickly gone to pinpoint. It felt like she was surrounded.

She could have been. But that was the thing about this strange family, about Tsuji; she could be surrounded without them ever setting foot near her.

Speaking of.

'We're almost there,' Byakko told them, after an age of twists and turns in the near-silence and dark. Even with so little visibility, she could see the line of tension in his shoulders.

She heard Daisukenojo swallow heavily. Understandable; this was a foreign group of fighters with a potent bloodline limit, and one he'd already felt the brunt of all throughout his adolescence. Ones who had Yamada, and had somehow managed to keep him there against his will.

Byakko looked back at her. 'They'll kill you if you try anything,' he said.

Still wary, then, she thought. Maybe he had been there in the bamboo forest, had gone to get his brother and felt a fraction of the fear she'd felt when she had thought she was going to die. When she'd woken up to a world on fire.

'He might just bail,' Daisukenojo muttered to her. 'You know we're probably walking into a trap.'

She nodded. But they didn't have many options.

The calm, green smell of the forest had been replaced with that damp smell of leaf rot in the cooler night air. It set an unfortunate tone. Byakko moved to walk again, but—

'Wait!' Daisukenojo said, dropping to one knee to quickly rummage through his pack. After a second of searching, he pulled out a light travelling cloak and tossed it around Byakko's shoulders. On Daisukenojo, it came to his knees. On Byakko it barely hit mid-thigh and he looked down at it bemusedly.

'It's for hiding. The wires and stuff,' Daisukenojo said, pointing.

Byakko wiggled razor-bound fingers. 'Thanks,' he said dryly. He looked over to Raiku. 'I've told them that I'm escorting you both. So. Stay by me.' He was telling her, not asking, she observed. So much for the fear.

She looked up again, and there was a compound blending into the woods, one where there had been nothing before.

The high walls were made of worn stone, the gates in front of them so tall she had to crane her neck back to see the name  _Takeshita_  carved into the top. Through them, gold light poured out from sconces in the sides of traditional wooden homes, surrounding a large, primary structure and wooden steps led up to a large doorway.

It was all very Dramatic. It was also, she had to admit, beautiful.

Or it would have been beautiful, if the picture hadn't been ruined by tiny details on closer inspection, mostly hidden in the dark. A nearby section of the outer walls had been partially destroyed where it joined to the large compound gates, the stone cracked and broken outwards like it had suffered a great blow. The large, traditional roof of the closest building had, upon a second look, been stripped of half the terracotta tiles and now just displayed wind-worn wood.

The man standing guard by the gate was so tense she almost mistook him for a statue. He was also alone, which came as a surprise. Byakko picked up the pace, jogging the last few steps towards him.

'Kanji… What happened?' Byakko asked, gesturing at the general disarray after he and the random family member had briefly clasped hands. Raiku assumed this was that manly way of hugging she had heard so much about.

This Kanji person's expression was tight. It also had three harsh red lines gouged across it, rendering his face grotesque by the torchlight. His clothes were traditional working gear in dark green, a single folded jinbei. He also sported strapped sandals and knifes along his side, she noted; another armed son of a bitch.

'Welcome back,' Kanji said shortly instead of answering. He glanced at Raiku and Daisukenojo. 'You said you could control them. We need that to be true, Byakko.'

Byakko looked back at them. Raiku tried her best to look innocent. ...well. Tried. The mask was too sketchy for her to pull it off usually, but she generally managed a pretty good "terrified".

The wires around him pulled her ever forwards.

'They'll be fine,' Byakko said.

Kanji looked reluctant and more than a little hostile. Also, she couldn't help but notice with no small amount of vindictiveness: exhausted. On cue, a loud crash sounded from further into the property. There was a shrill, pained cry.

Kanji tensed.

Byakko flinched, but Raiku knew that involuntary shudder.

She brightened. 'Ryuu!' She pushed Byakko aside, ducking past Kanji, and sprinted onto the packed earth of the courtyard. The cry had come from a building to their right, more dilapidated that the large building that sat central to everything, and even if she hadn't heard anything she would have known that was where Ryuu must be.

The walls of it were shaking.

'Seiryu! You need to— _Ryuu_ , then,  _calm down_!' A low voice snapped and then cursed, and the entire structure shuddered. Wind whistled through the doorframe; the wooden slats of a window nearby exploded outwards in a shower of splinters.

Raiku raced up the steps and threw open a strangely heavy sliding door, the reinforced frame screeching along its tracks.

And Ryuu.

Finally,  _Ryuu_ —looked up with a icy, enraged expression, squinting bloodshot yellow eyes into the sudden light. She waved eagerly as his eyes seemed to adjust, sudden recognition crashing down on him. He froze, pupils suddenly shrinking to small dots as he focused. He had a man she recognised from years earlier pinned beneath him, one hand digging roughly into the man's neck and the other shoved into a painful pressure point that had immobilised his opponent's arm from the shoulder down.

She beamed. Classic Ryuu.

The man twisted his head carefully, trying to see what Ryuu was so distracted by without getting his neck broken.

'Raiku,' Ryuu said, low voice scratchier than usual. Probably because of all the threats he'd been shouting, she thought affectionately.

She spread her arms wide, confident he wouldn't take her up on the implied offer of a hug. 'We found you!'

Ryuu lifted the man just to slam his head back down, then shifted from where he knelt on his chest. His bare feet thudded to the woven floor and he stood, drawing himself up and rounding the man's body to stalk towards her.

Raiku's glee faltered.

Wait.

She took an automatic step back.

How long had it taken her to notice, again?

'Zeshin!' Byakko appeared at her side, taking hold of her upper arm for a moment to push her aside. It had to be Byakko, by the way Ryuu immediately stilled. She marvelled, because wow; Ryuu didn't mess around. Byakko tended to pause like a normal person, but Ryuu just became a statue. Half-cast in shadow, hardly breathing.

Byakko faltered at the sight of him.

'…Sei,' he said, suddenly breathless. Raiku wanted to see his face, wanted to see the expression all this Drama and that winding Plot had culminated in, but she couldn't look away from Ryuu's sharp, frozen features. Thinking of the truce that they had made to get here, and the violence ready to break it that she could see scrawling down Ryuu's arms, the minute tensing of his jaw.

'Byakko,' she said slowly, 'step back.'

Byakko didn't. Ryuu hadn't blinked since he saw him, settled into stillness like a snake poised to strike.

'Byakko,' she said more urgently, trying not to raise her voice and trigger the tension readied in Ryuu. 'You need to back off, now.' Her mind was racing: Ryuu was unpredictable. He could calm down, he could go totally the other way but if this erupted into violence then she couldn't stop him, not without them trying to  _protect_  him of all things, like  _she_  was the one they needed to be worried about—

Ryuu moved so quickly she almost couldn't follow it, but a familiar shape crashed into him before he could get anywhere.

'Ryuu, stop!' Daisukenojo yelled over Ryuu's enraged snarl, managing to get a hold of Ryuu's arm enough to throw his balance off. Ryuu swiftly began to dissolve but Daisukenojo twisted his arm before he could, Ryuu slamming back into solidity in response to the pain. 'You can't! Calm down!'

Ryuu had his teeth bared and his eyes were wild; he was struggling more effectively against Daisukenojo's immediate hold than Raiku would have. It was a jarring change from his usual controlled irritation, this dishevelled whirlwind of motion with sharp teeth and fingers outstretched to hurt. He was getting close to breaking out, faster than she had expected. But then, they seemed to have very different approaches. Raiku tended to struggle  _towards_  what she wanted, while Ryuu seemed to specifically struggle  _against_  the person holding him.

She took this in with real professional interest.

'Could you stop staring and help— _gak!_ ' Daisukenojo's cry cut off when Ryuu's elbow slammed into his windpipe, getting an arm free.

Raiku planted her hand on Byakko's forehead and shoved him backwards, forcing him down to the ground just as Ryuu's hand darted forward where his brother's eyes had been.

'Goddamnit Ryuu!' Daisukenojo cried as she crouched low by Byakko's face, keeping her hand on his forehead just in case he decided to get smart about this. The key to keeping this poor bastard alive long enough for them to get out of this damn compound unscathed, she knew, would be for him to seem as harmless as possible. As non-threatening to Ryuu as he possibly could be after having already literally replaced him once.

Ryuu surprised her by pausing, held back by Daisukenojo's forearm wrapped around his chest, heaving for air.

'You're taking his side?' he asked hoarsely, his usually brushed-back hair falling in his face. He looked like hell, she realised for the first time. There were fine veins visible at the base of his throat and the corners of his wild eyes, red webbing there the way an enemy's capillaries burst when  _he_  used a technique on them. His fingertips were bloody, and they'd given him the same change of clothes Kanji had worn but they were torn, dishevelled, pulled aside in his struggle against Daisuke to show a section of shoulder.

' _His_  side?! We fucking came here to save  _you!'_  Daisukenojo snapped, but Ryuu ignored him, looking straight at Raiku.

She swallowed. Byakko tried to move against her hand and she pushed him back down roughly, drawing Ryuu's attention to her bare hand, stark against Byakko's tan.

His breath came out in a hiss. He tensed again. Daisukenojo shifted his weight to brace better against the woven floor, preparing for another surge of energy.

' _Enough!_ ' the man, Zeshin roared. Raiku jumped. Zeshin had gotten to his feet during the chaos and now stood, rubbing roughly at his shoulder. His lips were faintly blue, but his face was as lovely as she remembered. Sharp features, an androgynous voice. His accent, unplaceable and alien, was enough to make her smell the ghost of smoke, to twitch backwards from remembered pain. His eyes were yellow, but his hair was black and far longer than Ryuu's. The resemblance was striking; even more so when he looked as angry as he did at that moment. 'Byakko, go to the house and wait for me there,' he ordered, flicking his hand. Byakko moved to protest, but Zeshin fixed him with a sharp look and he just pushed Raiku's hand off and he obeyed, casting a reluctant look back at Ryuu before he turned a corner and vanished.

'Seiryu—'

'Ryuu,' Raiku corrected automatically.

Zeshin glanced at her. 'Ryuu,' he repeated, 'please sit down.'

Ryuu pushed forward against Daisukenojo's arm, but the shorter boy didn't move. 'No offence,' Daisuke said stiffly to Zeshin, 'but I know  _this_  asshole pretty well and unless you wanna lose  _that_  asshole forever, you don't want me to let him go yet.'

Ryuu looked convincingly murderous, even settling from that strange mania that had gripped him.

Zeshin shook his head. 'Fine,' he said. He himself took a seat, still rubbing at his shoulder. 'Now that you know these two are alright, I trust we can have a civil conversation?' he asked Ryuu wearily. 'Now that you can be sure I didn't murder them and hide their bodies in the woods, or whatever dramatics you suspected.'

'"Dramatics"?' Ryuu echoed. She saw Daisukenojo tighten his grip just in time for Ryuu to try and lunge forward. 'You replaced me! You abducted me!'

'And I reunited you with your team, didn't I?' Zeshin asked.

'No, Byakko brought us back here after Raiku tried to kill him twice,' Daisukenojo said, awkwardly craning his head to be seen over Ryuu's shoulder.

Zeshin tilted his head. A long lock of black hair slipped over his shoulder. 'Byakko brought you back to us when Ryuu wouldn't settle without you. He let you think what you needed to get here.'

Daisukenojo groaned in frustration when Raiku pointed at him accusingly. 'See, evil twin!' Raiku said shrilly. 'We should never have forgotten that, of  _course_  he was up to something!'

'We?! You're the one who proposed we come here in the first place!'

'Only because you wouldn't let me burn the forest down!'

'Maybe if you had  _told_  me that it wasn't Ryuu from the start, we could have had the time to make a better plan!'

'If you're quite done?' Zeshin interrupted.

Raiku flushed self-consciously. Yes, they had fallen into their usual bickering in this highly dangerous situation, in front of an enemy. That had happened. Had happened more than once, in fact, like it was all they knew how to do as stress relief. Raiku collapsed to a sitting position, while Daisukenojo remained awkwardly keeping Ryuu steady.

Sure, she thought, Ryuu looked less… terrifyingly out of control  _now_. But the second he was released, Byakko was going to get brutally strangled to death and then the compound would turn into murder central. No amount of abduction, trauma and situational delicacy would stop Ryuu from being himself.

'I know that this has been less than ideal,' Zeshin said to Raiku, almost apologetic but not quite, 'and I'm sorry for the trouble we have caused you.'

'"Trouble",' Daisukenojo repeated incredulously.

'By abducting Ryuu and Yamada, keeping them prisoner here and replacing them with Ryuu's evil twin?' Raiku finished for him. He'd need all his concentration to keep Ryuu from escaping. Even at that very moment Ryuu was shifting a little, probably getting ready to break free again. 'Also, look at what you've done to him!' she gestured at Ryuu's general state of dishevelment. 'He looks terrible!'

Zeshin frowned. 'Firstly, Byakko is hardly evil. Overzealous, maybe. But we never had any intention of hurting Ryuu. We just wanted to keep him here to speak with him, we didn't think his—your,' he corrected, looking at Ryuu, 'response would be so extreme.'

'I thought you'd been watching him,' Raiku said with a probably unjustifiable feeling of pride. 'You should have known he'd try and kill you.'

'Never stops, this guy,' Daisukenojo said. From his tone, he also found himself feeling weirdly affectionate about Ryuu's relentless homicidal drive.

Ryuu just bared his teeth again.

Zeshin sighed, rubbing his shoulder once more. 'I  _thought_  he would at least be curious enough to hear us out.'

'I mean, he probably is curious, a little,' Raiku allowed. 'But it's Ryuu. So.'

Zeshin shook his head. He looked tired, suddenly. 'We never wanted this. We never wanted to hurt you.' He covered his eyes with his hand briefly. 'You're my nephew. I remember when my sister was—' He broke off into another sigh. Raiku wondered uncharitably if he knew how to exhale inaudibly, though she herself had also sighed much more since Ryuu had come into her life. 'I promise we won't hurt you. Or your teammates. But I'd like to speak to you in the morning, now that you know they're safe.' He looked at Ryuu. 'Is that acceptable?'

Ryuu glared in silence.

'Fine,' Daisukenojo said instead. 'He's fine with it.'

Zeshin didn't look happy at Ryuu's apparently consistent refusal to go along with anything, but he did duck his head and made a silent, graceful exit. The door closed behind him and sealed with a flash of chakra that even Raiku couldn't miss.

Silence reigned amongst Team Yamada for a time, the three of them now trapped inside.

'What are the odds that Zeshin  _doesn't_ kill us in our sleep?' Raiku wondered idly.

'Let me go,' Ryuu said loudly instead of answering her extremely pertinent question. 'It's fine. Just let me go already.'

Daisukenojo craned his neck but sent Raiku a questioning look when he obviously couldn't read Ryuu's expression from that angle. The tension had drained from Ryuu while they weren't looking and now his arms hung limply over where Daisukenojo had him restrained. He looked for all the world like a disgruntled cat held against its will, incongruously normal in the surreal cast of their surroundings. Raiku reluctantly nodded, and he released him. Ryuu swiftly turned around and clapped Daisukenojo directly on the ear, hand cupped to cause maximum pain. Daisukenojo went down with a yelp while Ryuu stood over him, shaking out his hand.

He turned to face Raiku, eyes glinting.

She waved. 'He-ey, buddy,' she began, then scrambled backwards when he advanced. 'Hey hey hey, I knew it wasn't you  _I'm the one who noticed!'_ She covered her head with her arms when he stopped in front of her.

A second passed. She cautiously creaked an eye open. Ryuu dropped to a knee in front of her and his hand darted out, only to be yanked away with a hiss when a thin tendril of electricity sparked to life between their bare skin.

Raiku blinked. She wasn't sure what he had been expecting, really.

'Why did it work for him?' Ryuu asked, the question almost directed at himself. 'Why was it just him?' He was opening and closing his hands into fists at his sides, the thing Raiku knew she did herself, when…

Oh no, she realised in horror; this wasn't Ryuu  _angry_  anymore. This was Ryuu  _distressed_.

He was reaching out for human contact and the electricity in her skin had  _bitten_  him for it. 'Hey,' she said quickly, scrambling onto her knees in front of him, trying to catch his eye, her hands hovering anxiously. She was unable to give him the contact he clearly wanted, but she wanted to do  _something_. 'It's okay! We found you, we're okay! We're going to get out of here and it's going to be fine!'

She shot Daisukenojo a pleading look over Ryuu's shoulder.

To her great and profound horror, that shoulder shook slightly.

'Daisuke!' she said, high-pitched and nervous. 'You gotta—just—' she made a vague wrapping motion. 'Just do it!'

Daisukenojo had the grey pallor of a man who knew he was walking to his execution. He awkwardly shuffled to Ryuu's side. With the greatest of discomfort, he wrapped an arm around his shoulders. 'It's… okay,' he coughed. 'We're, uh. We're here and uh. We're gonna get Yamada and. Y'know. Go home.' Obviously at a loss for what to do, he lifted his other hand to pat Ryuu's arm. 'And it'll be fine.'

Ryuu grimaced, but he didn't pull away. Without moving, something seemed to collapse quietly inside his body and he seemed to become.

Smaller.

Ryuu's rage could fill a room, could suffocate a person with its weight, but she'd never known how quiet it would feel to see that crack open.

After a long moment, he sighed. Raiku wondered if he would ever realise how much it made him look like Zeshin, that expression he wore. 'They don't have Yamada,' he said, lifting a hand to press it to his face. 'They just had me.'

'But Byakko—'

Daisukenojo made a chopping motion, but not before Ryuu glared at her viciously through the crack in his fingers.

She corrected hastily. ' _Someone_  basically…' hadn't said that at all, she realised. Had let her say it and let it pass without correction, like her dad would have. Or a textbook  _evil twin_. 'Shit.' Still, a glare was better than the alternative.

'How stupid are you two?' Ryuu asked, but she could tell his heart wasn't in it. 'These guys are strong, but they're not outfitted to deal with Yamada for any length of time. He's a havoc specialist.'

'I don't know what that is, but it sounds about right,' Raiku said, tapping her fingers to her chin. 'They probably know where he is, though. They seem pretty well-established in this forest, and uh,  _he_  said they were taking advantage of the attacks.'

Daisukenojo let his pack slide off his shoulder and drop to the floor with a  _thud_ , clearly using the excuse to remove his arm from around Ryuu now he'd been distracted from his rising trauma levels. 'Great. Just great. We finally thought we'd found both of you and it turns out we just got the crazy one.'

Raiku moved to remove her own pack, but at her first shift backwards Ryuu grabbed her arm above the elbow to keep her in place. With a layer of fabric safely placed between their skin, he held on so tightly she could almost feel the bruise forming. When she looked up he had that manic light in his eyes again, that split-second away from violence hovering there between them. She froze without consciously deciding to do so.

Daisukenojo reinserted himself into Ryuu's space, his freckled hand coming up to grip Ryuu's wrist. 'She's not going anywhere, man,' he said, with obviously forced calm. Daisukenojo had never been the one to calm Ryuu down, and this was really not the role life had prepared him for. 'We're gonna stay right here and if that Byakko shithead comes back, we'll kick him to the curb. Okay? None of us are going anywhere.'

Ryuu nodded, after a while. 'You knew it wasn't me,' Ryuu said, staring at her. He was looking for some kind of answer, she realised; some kind of assurance that she would know if Byakko came again, that she would know to look if Ryuu was taken away a second time. 'You did.'

She tried a smile. It didn't sit right on her face, kept sliding off to join those dark thoughts sitting at the base of her brain that said

 _I was going to watch you die_ _I was going to_ kill _you_

and there was no explanation she could give that he would understand. No way to describe to him what it had felt like to watch the universe devour that false Ryuu and know he'd have to die. 'He wasn't you,' she said instead, her best attempt at confidence. 'He's not you.'

It seemed to take an age for Ryuu to let her go and it looked like it hurt, like he had to lift his fingers one by one against his own resistance.

When he was finally free, she edged away as subtly as she could manage. She'd touched Byakko's bare skin, she thought; he'd touched her bare face and she had never felt more exposed than when Ryuu had looked at her and waited for her to tell him she would notice if he was gone.

The thought settled as guilt in her stomach.


	67. in the shape of you

Raiku fell asleep quickly despite the unlikely nature of their surroundings, but then, she always did. It had long been a source of friction between her and Daisukenojo, who maintained that no one as lackadaisical about murder as she was should sleep so well.

Getting back to sleep, though.

Raiku stared up at the ceiling, listening to the gentle sounds of Ryuu and Daisukenojo breathing in the dark.

Getting  _back_  to sleep was the issue.

Wind gently pushed against the tiny wooden house, boards creaking in the dark. It rustled through the tree outside their broken window, the movement of its branches in the dim torchlight making yellow shapes flicker along the ceiling.

Was Byakko asleep, she wondered. Was Byakko staring at the ceiling as well, still so desperate to see his brother? Was Zeshin pacing around the perimeter of this battered compound, sliding through the dark like a waiting knife? Still so angry, the kind of anger she'd seen in Ryuu yet never truly understood.

It wasn't easy, but she closed her eyes and tried to imagine it. In a world without her father, without anyone who understood the things she could see or what she could do, how would she feel? Would it be different without years of Gairano conditioning, would that white-blinding part of her mind be louder, harder, more the forefront of her life and less the backdrop?

She could feel it thrumming at the back of her mind even now, that charged foundation at the base of her thoughts. That deep, roaring hunger that she was so used to she could barely feel it anymore. It felt precarious, somehow; she could almost picture what it would be like, could almost feel her way to Ryuu's perspective. But her mind just wasn't bending that way; she could rationalise her way to a solution, but trying to actually feel it was like pulling teeth. Or reaching for a knife that she'd already thrown, or walking down the stairs and finding one missing when she'd already taken the step.

Raiku scrubbed at her eyes. Time to try again, to take a different approach. She squirmed slightly on the futon, sharp shoulder blades shifting down into the fabric, and closed her eyes again.

Not Ryuu, maybe, but Zeshin. What would her father have done, if she had been taken and he'd found her years later? If he'd found her again and then, once he'd clawed his way back into her life, discovered she'd wanted nothing to do with him? If she had hated him for being the victim of someone else's ruthlessness?

 _I killed her for what she did to you_.

Her eyes shot open again.

No. The thought somehow felt careful in her mind. No. That wouldn't be helpful.

Well, what was  _she_  feeling?

Raiku stared at the dark ceiling, watching the patterns of shadows shift and change.

Hungry, she decided, and sat up.

No  _wonder_  she hadn't been getting anywhere, how was she meant to empathise with her stomach eating itself? She rubbed her face, pushing staticky strands out of her eyes. Stifling a yawn, she cast her bleary eyes around the rest of the room. They were probably planning on feeding Ryuu in the morning, which would now likely include her and Daisukenojo. Hopefully. Oh god, would they not feed her? No. No, they would. But they'd only had field rations once since the Plot event that separated them all, and Raiku generally had to eat about four standard intakes per meal to maintain the right balance.

She wasn't super willing to wait that long.

She turned her attention to the door. Zeshin had sealed it in a deliberately obvious way, and they were jumpy around her because of a couple of death threats and a single  _minor_  explosive event  _years_  ago. She shouldn't leave.

Her stomach grumbled. It was an oddly threatening sound.

Raiku gingerly pulled herself free of the blanket, sliding her leg out from under where Daisukenojo had thrown his over her in his sleep. For such a small person, he had a unique gift for taking up an enormous amount of sleeping space. Ryuu, at least, may have fallen asleep on his side facing her and been terrifying her that way, but he slept perfectly still. No need to be concerned about accidental clinging there. Just the unsettling thought that you maybe were sleeping next to a dead body.

Would Daisukenojo lock onto Ryuu without her in between? She looked down at them. Daisukenojo  _did_  have that tendency, but he'd lived a long and full life already. She shrugged and padded over to one of the broken windows, quickly hoisting herself up to poke her upper body outside.

Reassuring, cool darkness.

Empty paths through the houses, for what she could see in the sporadic torchlight.

A splinter digging into her ribs.

In other words, it was the perfect set-up for scavenging.

Raiku hoisted herself further up and rolled out through the window, dropping down into a perfect crouch. Because she was an excellent shinobi and things were always this competently pulled off. She dusted her hands off. Sure, Zeshin had locked them in door-wise, but how seriously could he have really meant it if he didn't seal the windows?

It was possible that he'd assumed they would take the hint, she supposed. But really, you could never assume that sort of thing; teenagers were naturally rebellious.

Raiku, who had at most been rebellious against gravity, ignored the trend she was bucking and crept down between the houses.

Food. Food food food. There were a lot of small houses, but generally there'd be a dedicated cooking area in wider clan compounds. Large gatherings didn't exactly fit in a single house, so there was usually a hall or something. The Gairano solved this by having potluck gatherings, but she'd never seen an actual clan take that route. She peered out from between houses, feeling out concentrations of metal. Kitchens generally had the most metal by far in the average home, even for shinobi. ...Well. With shinobi it came down to the kitchen and bedroom.

A thin line crossed her vision, falling from a roof. She blinked and tried to trace it back, momentarily afraid of a spiderweb.

The black mass of a Plot greeted her when she looked up.

Raiku choked.

It stretched in thin tendrils, draping and shifting restlessly over the roofs she stood between. What she had mistaken for a night sky was its large mass, slowly dragging itself over to the next building from the one she and her team had rested in.

She watched it, mute with equal parts horror and disgust. It ignored her completely, instead spreading thinner and thinner as it reached the next house and seeped in through the walls, through the cracks in the tiles. It was worse for how slowly, how… carelessly it moved, a whale amongst the fish she usually encountered outside of the main body of the Naruto arcs. It had a strange, sickly sheen of grey, like cobwebs across its oozing surface.

It was silent. The impressions she should have gotten at such a distance were muted, as if conveyed through several layers of something thick. Cold. The smell of smoke. A strong, dizzying sense of sickness, gone quickly.

Raiku realised she'd clutched her chest with one hand when she felt her heart racing under her hand, when the malformed Plot had gone on its strange quest through the brickwork of the next house and vanished there. She swallowed heavily, turning the claw of her hand into an open palm to pat her own chest in feeble reassurance as she stared at where it had been.

She'd never seen a Plot that didn't have at least the same exterior as the others. Even when Naruto trailed it everywhere he went and she couldn't help but basically fall over it, she'd never seen one so sluggish or, or  _webbed_ , she'd never—

'…Tsuji?' she whispered.

Silence.

Trying to keep as still as possible, she covertly glanced from side to side. He hadn't been subtle before; he'd just appeared out of nowhere. Was that what she could expect now? Was that what she…

'What are we looking at?' someone whispered into her ear. Raiku jerked and skittered away, and it was only years of exposure to Kakashi that kept her from screaming in surprise. Instead she gracefully shoved her hand over her own mouth and sort of silently convulsed, eyes wide.

Byakko looked at her coolly, warily, amber eyes peering out of the shadows. 'What are you doing out of the house?' he asked. Raiku pressed her lips together firmly, fighting the urge to yell at him for sneaking up on her. She made a strangled humming noise. Byakko took a step towards her. 'Gairano, what are you doing out of the house?' he repeated. That feigned look of curiosity always masked anger on Ryuu. She had a sinking feeling it was similar with Byakko.

'Zeshin said you were all going to speak in the morning, but here you are,' he said conversationally. Another step. 'Outside. In my family's territory. Between houses. While they're  _sleeping_ —'

'I was hungry!' Raiku exclaimed, before that could go to the dark place it was clearly headed. 'I haven't eaten properly in days and it's not like you guys left us with food!'

Byakko stared at her.

'Or water,' she added sullenly.

There was a long, strained pause.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. 'So you... Wait.' He made a vague gesture. 'Let me get this straight. You're telling me that you left the house that my uncle—a highly trained shinobi with years of experience on you and as far as you suspect, dubious motives at best—told you to stay inside, and started wandering around a hostile compound in the middle of the night, alone, because you were hungry. With no idea where you were going.'

Raiku coughed into her hand. 'See, when you say it like that, it sounds bad.'

Byakko leaned in, eyes wide and earnest and just wrong in a face copied from Ryuu's. 'Please understand that it  _is_  bad,' he said seriously. 'I need to know that you understand that. Even if you're lying, you need to  _lie better_.'

Raiku felt a blush coming on, but substituted it with a glare. ' _This_  is bad?' she asked. 'You guys replaced my teammate with an evil twin after stalking him for three years, who are the bad ones here?!'

Byakko clapped a hand over her mouth and looked around. 'Lower your voice!' he hissed.

Raiku slowly narrowed her eyes at him and fought the urge, as hard as it would have been with the mask in place, to lick his hand. That couldn't have been a normal response, surely? No. She just couldn't get the hang of the casual touching business. People didn't just go around licking the hands on their mouths, Raiku,  _God_.

He huffed impatiently through his nose, glancing up at the window she'd escaped from. 'Get back in the house,' he ordered, jabbing his finger at the window. 'Right now. Before someone sees you.'

Raiku hadn't been in the mood to wait for breakfast even before she'd climbed out a window, seen  _yet another_  rogue Plot, and then this guy was just…

She folded her arms. 'No.'

Byakko's eyebrows shot up. 'Excuse me?'

She couldn't pull off a pout, she knew, even if she hadn't had the mask on, but this would not stand. 'I'm not going back until I eat something,' she said firmly. She couldn't be sure, but she was pretty certain that Byakko wouldn't be able to resist the chance to get her alone. He was made of the sort of causal weave that couldn't ignore this Expositional opportunity. A normal shinobi, a non-Character, would have told her to get her ass inside and maybe stabbed her to drive the point home.

Byakko hesitated.

Raiku suppressed a smile.

He looked down either side of the path they were on, then jerked his head towards the darker way. 'Follow me. Try not to kill anyone.'

'Oh my god,' she muttered, padding along after him. 'It was  _one time_.'

Byakko led her to a house near the building they'd been kept in and dragged her in through the back way. The kitchen they ended up in was small with a scratched, worn countertop. The wood was a pale kind she wasn't familiar with, which narrowed it down to everything but "pine" and "burning." It was actually a little like a smaller version of her own kitchen, complete with scorch marks. It did have a tiny lucky bamboo in a pot by the windowsill, which she caught a glimpse of before Byakko crossed the room and yanked the blinds down. That was a major difference. Poor little guy would never have survived on her windowsill.

So flammable.

'If I'm going to feed you, we're gonna have some conditions. Okay?' Byakko said curtly. 'One: no death threats.'

That was hardly fair. Raiku had only recently discovered how effective her death threats were and they were already taken away?

She was hungry, though. So she'd have to give him that.

'Two: once you've eaten, you go right back into the house with the others. Got it?'

Raiku awkwardly saluted. 'Got it.'

Byakko did not seemed reassured by what she had intended to be a very reassuring salute. But he nodded, hands braced on the counter and studying her for a second. Then he turned around and started pulling things out of cupboards, sliding a glass of water towards her while he moved around touching… food things. Raiku, not a fantastic cook, a good cook, or any kind of mediocre one for that matter, took the chance to study her surroundings instead of really paying attention. There were photos lining the nearby mantel, a word she had honestly thought was made up to confuse her until she realised Daisukenojo's house had one. The kitchen may have been small but the house itself was reasonably spacious and traditional to a fault. It had a dark wooden frame, old-world sliding doors and rooms with pale woven mats that made her feel acutely guilty for wearing shoes.

He waited until she took a sip of water before he spoke again. 'Three: you tell me how the hell to get Sei to trust us.'

Raiku inhaled water.

Byakko, like almost everyone she'd ever almost choked to death in front of, ignored her desperate hacking and gasping. He poured the boiling water into the small bowls he'd set on the counter, tossing some sliced spring onion in as well.

'What,' she coughed eventually.  _'What_.'

'Seiryu. Ryuunosuke. Whatever. He trusts you two. How can we get him to at least stop trying to murder us?'

Raiku tried to tell if Byakko was serious. He sounded serious, but her eyes were watering too much for her to make him out clearly enough to be sure.

'Ryuu barely trusts his mother,' she managed, thumping her chest and coughing again. 'Definitely… not me!'

'Do  _not_ ,' Byakko said, raising a hand. 'Don't try that. You're not the ones he's trying to murder. You clearly have the advantage.'

The sheer insanity of that sentence left her stunned for a moment.

Surely.  _Surely_  he had noticed all the attempted murder while the stalking was going on? It must have come up.

Surely.

'Even if I did know,' she said roughly, swallowing again, 'I… wouldn't tell you…?'

Byakko shrugged. 'I assumed. But that's not really convenient, so you understand my reluctance to just leave it at that.'

Raiku eyed him. 'You're pretty blasé about trying to get an advantage on Ryuu, given how much you guys have... hurt him. I mean, your uncle roughed him up a fair bit.'

Byakko didn't answer immediately. She blinked hard, dispelling the last of the wateriness. He had his back to her, so she took the chance to quickly sip some water to clear her throat.

'Yes,' Byakko said finally. 'He did, didn't he.'

There was a strange tension in him that she didn't really want to investigate further. 'Where is he, anyway?' she asked. The photos around them were usually Byakko and Zeshin with others. Byakko, always smiling no matter what age he appeared as, Zeshin sometimes doing the same. It was confirming her suspicions:

Ryuu could have been a damn cute kid if he'd smiled once in a while.

It seemed to do the trick anyway. Byakko snorted. 'If I know my uncle, he's probably at my grandparents' house arguing our grandmother out of dropping in on Seiryu.'

'Your grandparents are still alive?

'Yes.' Byakko placed the bowl of miso soup in front of her in a small, plain green bowl. 'Sorry,' he said, snagging one of his own and the seat next to her. 'This late, this is basically all I've got at the ready.'

Raiku nodded, pulling the mug closer to herself. It smelt comfortingly familiar, tiny chunks of tofu bobbing in it. 'Why are you…' She trailed off. She licked her lips then tried again. 'Why are you being nice to me? You tricked us into coming here.'

Byakko raised his eyebrows. 'Is it that hard to believe that I'm just a nice person? That my family's not that bad?'

Raiku gave him A Look.

He looked down, hiding a rueful smile. 'Good point.'

'Yeah,' she said flatly. 'We have  _met_  your uncle.'

His smile slowly faded. 'Right,' he echoed.

That carried them into a deeply uncomfortable silence.

Fortunately, Raiku knew exactly how to fix this. It came from years of experience. She opted to totally ignore it in favour of yanking down her mask to hastily drink as much soup as possible while he was awkwardly staring elsewhere. By the time he looked back at her she was mostly nursing dregs, mask secured back around her nose.

He'd already had his hands all over her damn face, some mental voice said snidely. She responded to this with great maturity, and only had to restrain the one hair-pulling motion.

Byakko had taken ample use of this time for some pre-Exposition Brooding, evidently, but he had a few false starts before he could get a sentence out. 'I love my uncle, okay, he's not like this,' he began, brow wrinkled, 'he's not... With all of this, he's not being himself. He's…' Byakko took a long sip of his bowl of miso soup, stared fixedly ahead. 'He hates you,' he said. 'He hates you all so much.'

Raiku settled back on her chair and absently pulled her mug close to her chest once more. She let that idea sink in along with the warmth of the mug in her hand.

Byakko looked down in his soup, then looked at her, amber eyes serious. 'He will kill you if he suspects anything. He would have already if he'd caught you outside. But if he kills either of you, Seiryu will hate us just as much, won't he?'

Raiku raised her eyebrows. Because he seemed to genuinely be asking. Because he seemed to actually want an answer. So of course she was going to say, 'Yes.' She nodded and repeated it. 'Yeah, he would.' Likely would anyway, was what she didn't add. Ryuu wasn't forgiving. He would find it more comfortable to erase them than to forgive them, to hate them rather than to make room for them in his life after he'd left a hole in theirs. Ryuu was possessive the way Gairano were never supposed to be and he was proprietary about her and Daisukenojo, about every constant in his life. She could imagine the look on his face if he woke and found them dead or gone again.

She felt a twinge of guilt.

She should… probably get back before dawn.

Outside her internal monologue, Byakko nodded. He'd obviously expected that answer. His scheming was  _en pointe_.

Raiku chewed on her lip. Byakko was hardly a good source. She could hardly trust him. He was  _literally_  made from a universal web of causality and lies. But…

'What do you even want from him?' she asked reluctantly. She had to know. 'I mean, he grew up with another family. He has friends and a life in Konoha. What did you think would happen? Especially if you abducted him?'

Byakko considered this, eyes distant, but he didn't snap at her immediately. Didn't insult her admittedly scant observation skills by telling her an obvious lie. He thought about it.

'I don't know,' he said eventually. 'It's strange. It was hard to pretend to be him. We thought about getting Zeshin to do it; he's more experienced, more like him, but we didn't know if your teacher would detect the disguise. So I had to learn enough about him to replace him, but...' He shrugged one shoulder, still not looking at her. 'I don't know him at all. I don't know what I expected, really. We just… wanted him to come home. I wanted to know my brother.'

'He's. Hard to get to know,' Raiku said hesitantly. It didn't feel right to comfort Byakko, but he was there in front of her and she knew with impossible certainty that Tsuji would come for him eventually. It wasn't his fault that he came about the way he did. Frankly, it was probably her fault.

Raiku's grip tightened convulsively on the mug.

Wait. Was she responsible for Byakko?

Byakko finished his soup, ignorant to her sudden dismay.

He had come about when she had disrupted that Plot, she thought. He'd been produced by that excess, the excess that was  _her fault_.

Raiku eyeballed the oblivious Byakko.

What was her, her…  _Plot baby?!_

She shook her head rapidly. No. No no no.  _No_. That couldn't be real. Her dad certainly wouldn't stand for it. Plot grandchildren. Oh no.

'Safe,' Byakko said suddenly, interrupting her sudden spiral into madness. She looked over; he had a cool, calculating gaze. It was a strange change from the fury Ryuu's usually held. 'We make him feel unsafe. Even if we hadn't done anything, we're challenging to what he needs to believe about his life, about your village.'

Startled, Raiku stared at him.

'…But not what you believe,' he continued, casting her a look out of the corner of his eye. A considering look that she definitely didn't enjoy.

'Nope,' she said lightly. 'Not me.'

The corner of his mouth curled up slightly. Faced with that crooked smile under those cool eyes, she had the strangest feeling that he was satisfied in some way. That that was some rare thing, besides.

 _Oh you bastard_ , she thought in a mental voice strangely like her father's;  _you're trouble_.

'So I guess that's that,' he murmured.

Raiku couldn't really justify slapping that confusing look off his face, but her fingers still twitched. 'Yep,' she said with a nod and her eyes creased in a smile. 'Guess so.'

He slid his bowl across the counter to stop near the sink. 'Alright then. I'll take you back.'

Raiku left her own sitting where it was and hopped off the stool. Their walk back to the house was quiet but oddly, the silence didn't seem particularly strained. Either he genuinely hadn't expected to get any information from her or he'd decided he would have to try another route, but either way, he wasn't taking it very hard. When she came to the window she'd escaped from, he crouched down to give her a boost. Raiku wished, oh how she wished, that she could kick him in the face, but instead she just jumped up and wiggled through on her own.

As she landed noiselessly in the dark, she heard his muffled chuckle before she felt the trace metal on him move away.

Raiku crept across the room and put her hands on her hips, looking down at the boys. Daisukenojo had been shoved off the futon and was curled on his side on the floor. He had definitely tried to latch on to Ryuu, she decided, based on the bump on his forehead. Ryuu had moved to lie on his back, but had his eyes mercifully closed.

'Where were you?' Ryuu asked, when she'd managed to pry Daisukenojo off the edge of the sheet and lay down on the futon, just nestling in when he spoke.

Raiku paused in the act of guiltily pushing some blanket back over Daisuke. 'What?' she whispered.

'Where were you?' he repeated. He wasn't whispering. His voice was quieter than usual, but it didn't have the intimacy that whispering often gave voices.

She hesitated. 'Bath… room?' she offered.

Ryuu's eyes opened to the dark ceiling before he turned his head to face her. She expected him to look angry, but from what she could see of his features, what was lit of them by her own faint glow, he wasn't even irritated. She didn't recognise that expression. 'You don't have to tell me,' he said eventually. 'But don't lie.'

Raiku swallowed, having a hard time meeting his eyes. She nodded.

Seemingly satisfied, Ryuu rolled onto his other side to face away from her.

She fell back asleep before she had a chance to worry about it.

 

 

 

 

 

'Morning!'

A bright light suddenly jolted Raiku into wakefulness. She groaned, covering her eyes with her arm. 'A… ha?' she slurred, for no reason she could immediately recall after such a long night.

'Who—' Daisukenojo's sleep-rough voice paused. 'Why'm I on the floor?!'

Something prodded her in the side. Squinting, she made out Ryuu standing over her. Wide awake, clearly having been up and about for some time. 'Wake up,' he said, and she realised he was pushing her side with his foot. 'They're here.'

Raiku's waking mind took a moment to process that, then she shot up immediately.

Byakko smiled crookedly at her from the doorway. 'What's up?' he asked, wisely staying beyond the frame, out in the daylight. Zeshin stood behind his left shoulder, expression much more neutral than the day before. Actually… Raiku rubbed sleep out of her eyes.

Actually, he looked a little exasperated. Just a little.

'Byakko,' Zeshin said, a low and muttered warning. She'd heard that tone of reproach from her own father. 'We'll talk about this later.'

'Morning?' Raiku said with the kind of desperate cheer she usually reserved for any given interaction with Kakashi. It still came out sort of as a question in her uncertainty. Daisukenojo dragged a hand down his face and groaned.

Byakko shifted to let Zeshin walk in ahead of him, following with a small pile of wrapped bundles.

All of Raiku's senses immediately honed in on them. They smelt like baked goods. 'We brought some food for you to have before we talked,' Zeshin began, but Raiku had already started her ungainly stick-insect clamber across the futon towards Byakko.

She ignored Zeshin's raised eyebrows. 'That's incredibly unsettling,' he observed before Daisukenojo dragged her back across the blanket by one foot.

'Hey! No! You know the rules about shared food!' he exclaimed, stepping over her. He made sure to step on her on the way past just so she knew she was in trouble.

Raiku whined. 'But it's right there!' She buried her face in the blanket and groaned.

'No buts! We get a serving before you just go in there and demolish everything. You goddamn animal.' He quickly started taking things off Byakko's surprisingly well-balanced pile, handing them back to Ryuu to sort them out. 'Anything else?' he asked. Byakko nodded and jerked his head back to an  _exceptionally_ short woman standing behind them, holding a tray with a teapot and assortment of cups. Ryuu shoulder-checked Byakko on his way past and took the tray from her, giving her a surprisingly polite, if stiff, nod. She beamed at him.

It must have been because she was his mother's age, Raiku thought. Ryuu had been carefully trained to be polite to her friends after The Great Face Pinching. The thought was enough to cheer her up a little where she had smushed her face into the blanket.

Ryuu seemed briefly tempted to hurl the tray into Byakko's face on the way back past him, which was probably why Daisukenojo quickly snatched it. A few seconds of quiet mathematics between them and Raiku got tossed two warm, deftly wrapped packages.

Raiku glared at him balefully. 'Two?'

'There's only four, asshole!'

Glowering, she tore one open while Daisukenojo played host and poured tea out. To her surprise, Byakko and Zeshin sat down amongst them, each sliding an empty cup to him. Raiku, who had just discovered that the little wrapped packages were freshly baked bread filled with some sort of… salty, sauce-covered meat, was far too blissfully engrossed to really care.

After a startled pause, Daisukenojo poured tea for them as well.

Zeshin took a sip before he spoke. 'I wanted to apologise,' he said, looking at the three of them. Well, he sort of glossed over Raiku, but she was eating with her usual efficiency, so that was pretty understandable. 'I know that I have behaved badly, and done more harm than can be excused. I'm sorry.'

'Yeah,' Byakko agreed. 'Don't be fooled by his pretty face. His social graces are actually close to zero.'

'Thank you, Byakko,' Zeshin said in a voice as dry as a desert wind. 'Whatever would I do without you here to keep me humble?'

'Holy  _shit_  you remind me of Ryuu,' Daisukenojo blurted out. Raiku nodded fervently, mid-chew. The ambient temperature of the room dropped about four degrees.

'Really, man?' Daisukenojo asked Ryuu with a scowl, quickly swigging some tea for the warmth. 'Don't tell me that you don't see it.'

Ryuu continued to eat his delightful bread-thing with far more grace than Raiku. He did not deign to respond.

Daisuke did have a point, though: Zeshin, without the murky black veil of Plot, certainly  _did_  look a lot more like Ryuu. He wasn't totally free of it, but it was certainly the most liberated she'd seen him. Was this a more genuine version of him, then? Dry, proud, but ultimately willing to humble himself?

She couldn't know for sure, but it was still sort of interesting.

'Does this mean you won't be trying to strangle us again?' she asked around a mouthful of bread.

Zeshin slowly exhaled through his nose. He didn't look at her.

 _Wow_. She  _really_  pissed him off, huh?

'Don't feel too special,' Byakko advised Ryuu offhandedly. 'He's been scaring the shit out of my friends for years.' The tone was better, she observed suspiciously. More like Byakko was commiserating with Ryuu, but without implying too much intimacy.

He was learning too fast, adapting too quickly, especially irritating from someone who was at most, a few days old. Maybe it was the tiger-camouflage connection? It was a bit of a stretch thematically, but when had that stopped anything before? Raiku licked some crumbs off her gloves and dusted her hands off, quickly scanning the others. Ryuu was already done, but Daisukenojo hunched away from her the second he noticed her looking. He promptly crammed his remaining bread into his mouth in one go, flipping her off.

Charming. She made a face at him.

'So. What do you want?' Ryuu asked, turning to more fully face his two relatives. Daisuke and Raiku shifted easily to sit alongside him, now that he was clearly sending them back to the "us versus them" scenario. 'Let me guess: you're going to try and convince me that kidnapping me was for my own good again.'

Zeshin shook his head. 'No. I just wanted to show you a few things. From your parents' house.'

'You said that house burnt down,' Ryuu said warily.

'Well, it won't take long.' Zeshin's mouth had a bitter curve to it. 'Not a lot survived.'

Byakko handed a slim leather folio to Zeshin, which he opened slowly, with the kind of gravitas she would usually associate with a ritual and the smell of incense. 'This is your mother, Fuka,' he said, taking out a photo slightly yellowing around the edges. Raiku tallied up what she expected, Plot weaving around the thin slip of paper: beautiful, statuesque, dignified. Curiously wistful in that way people were in old photos.

Ryuu didn't lean forward to touch it. His expression hadn't changed since Zeshin had walked in. In the end it was Daisukenojo who awkwardly leant in front of him to take it from Zeshin, tilting it so that the three of them could see.

She wasn't wistful, Raiku noticed first. Fuka—no, too personal—Ryuu's mother had the kind of beaming, joyous smile that most people grew out of. Her front left canine was slightly crooked. Her hair was long and she wasn't beautiful, but she was lovely. Her face had a softness that Ryuu's hadn't for years, a dimple in her left cheek.

Raiku side-eyed Ryuu's cheek. A muscle clenched under his jaw, but there was no sign of dimples. Asymmetrical or otherwise.

Thank god, she thought, transferring her gaze back to the photo, to Ryuu's biological mother. There was enough there to call it a resemblance, something about that shape of her eyes that looked a little like Ryuu but more like Byakko. Above all, she was young. She was very lovely, and very young.

Daisukenojo gently pushed it into Ryuu's fingers. Ryuu stiffly took the photo but said nothing.

'And this… is all of you together,' Zeshin said. Byakko leaned a little closer. 'Fuka and your father, Hiniku.' Raiku shot Daisukenojo a look from behind Ryuu's back. Hiniku like… sarcasm? He wasn't looking at her. That was probably for the best. She wasn't being super respectful of the moment. She quickly looked back at the picture.

The ink was faded despite the obvious care that had been taken with it. It smelt strongly of smoke, which reeked equally of Plot manipulation. Raiku shook her head slightly; the content was what was important here. For the Plot, and for Ryuu.

The photo.

There were two adults in it. Ryuu's mother was recognisable immediately, even older, her hair messier and pulled into a low bun against her neck. She had that same radiant, joyful smile, this time directed with soft eyes at the baby pulled closely to her chest. There was a taller man standing close to her, holding a second infant. Both babies had that vaguely startled creased and grumpy look that newborns tended have.

 _Well_. Raiku examined the faded image of Ryuu's father.  _That explains a lot_.

Had she not known exactly what kind of failed narrative experiment this whole family was, Raiku would have looked at Ryuu's father and wondered when the Uchiha had gotten loose. As it was, the solemn and dark-haired, dark-eyed man just passed for a doppelganger. She had assumed that the similarities between Zeshin and Ryuu meant that Ryuu inherited his looks from his mother, but it was clear then how strongly he favoured his father. How closely he echoed the sharp, clean planes of his face. His stupidly long eyelashes. The resemblance about ended when it came to the baby clutching onto the folds of his shirt, braced there by a large, strong hand. It was Byakko, probably—more startled, less grumpy. The one the mother held looked grouchier, like he was on the verge of tears or screaming, but his mother just looked kindly down at him, frozen in time.

'Who…?' Daisukenojo asked, pointing at something low in the photo. Raiku squinted and leaned a little closer. What she had initially mistook for water damage resolved into a more recognisable shape the longer she looked at it. A set of wide, blurry eyes peered directly into the camera from the bottom of the photo, looking at them down what seemed to be part of a nose, obscuring the lower half of the parents' bodies.

'Suza,' Zeshin replied. 'Suzaku, my niece. She would have been twenty-one this year. This is the only photo of her that I have.'

'Suzaku.'

It was the first time Ryuu had spoken. He looked like he regretted it.

'Your sister,' Zeshin confirmed.

'Cute,' Ryuu said dully. He might have gotten away with it, Raiku thought, that slight thickness in his voice. In a universe where Zeshin's past hadn't been rewritten to include Byakko, to give Zeshin a lifetime of experience in almost-Ryuu's mannerisms, it wouldn't have been noticeable. As it was, Zeshin smiled sadly and the black wavering connection between them and Byakko wove a little thicker.

'She wanted to learn everything,' Zeshin said, eyes disarmingly soft. 'She was so excited to be a big sister.' The edge of his smile turned wry. 'Couldn't keep her out of anything.'

From the angle, Raiku guessed he'd been holding on to her. He'd probably had her braced on his hip or held close by a relative, maybe to peer upwards into the camera while he took the photo for them and instead she'd looked around at the lens at the critical moment. Curious, or maybe distracted, the only Suzaku ever photographed peered at them from almost seventeen years in the past.

She wasn't real, Raiku repeated mentally. Suzaku wasn't real. Byakko had only come about recently, which meant it had probably made Suzaku up as well just to add to the set. Another name from the list. And even if she  _had_  been real, Raiku rationalised, she was long gone and just fodder for a tragic backstory. She'd been a Character for her short, poignant life and then she'd died, exactly the way she was meant to. She couldn't have saved herself any more than the Konoha shinobi who killed her could have stopped themselves, couldn't have turned left when the Plot said right.

They weren't Gairano. There was no choice in any of this. She told herself that, over and over.

'You had a brother before. Genbu,' Zeshin said. 'He would have been the oldest, but he died when he was very small. Before you or Byakko were born.'

That made the full set of four, but it didn't bring a sense of relief to Raiku like she had expected. That was all four accounted for, no loose ends left. No faces to loom out at them in the future.

None left. Not anymore.

When she snuck a look at him, Ryuu's jaw was still clenching and unclenching. He hadn't glared at the photos in minutes. His gaze kept skittering up and to the side. His breath was too consciously steady. To Raiku, who didn't have Plot guidance but had spent years in wary surveillance of Ryuu's moods, none of these were good signs. He was clearly broadcasting that he was experiencing an emotion he was either unfamiliar or uncomfortable with, which was likely what he'd stuck so firmly to anger to avoid. Daisukenojo, who was generally better at human feelings, had shifted slightly closer under the pretence of getting closer to see the photos.

Raiku found herself holding her breath.

It couldn't last.

'I don't want to be here,' Ryuu said in a careful, very even tone. 'I want to leave now.' His eyes flickered up to Zeshin, then fixed on the door visible over his uncle's left shoulder.

'No, you can't leave yet, you haven't even met our grandparents—' Byakko protested, too quickly for Zeshin's quelling glare to shut him up in time.

The delicate balance of Ryuu's emotional state responded predictably. It crashed down on the side of anger. 'You just said I had to meet with you, no one said  _anything_  about staying!' he growled. The wet shine to his eyes nicely blended into rage.

Byakko made a sound of protest that provoked Ryuu into a standing position. Like any sound that Byakko could have made at that point, Raiku reflected, standing somewhat more reluctantly.

'He didn't mean that you had to,' Zeshin tried. He stood as well, hand held out in a pacifying gesture.

Raiku winced.

'You're right, I don't have to,' Ryuu said darkly.

'Ryuu, man, sit back down,' Daisukenojo said cautiously. Curiously, this prompted Ryuu's head to whip around so he could glare at Raiku. Like that was fair.

Raiku raised her eyebrows. Nothing to see there, she had absolutely stood up when he did. She wasn't the one trying to de-escalate Ryuu; she'd learned a long time ago that he was like the world's most temperamental self-cleaning oven. Either he'd sort himself out or he wouldn't. Nope. He couldn't  _possibly_  find fault with her reaction.

… No. No, he couldn't.

He narrowed his eyes at her for a second, but apparently finding nothing offensive in what she was doing, he turned back to look at Zeshin.

'We haven't broken the deal,' Zeshin told him, hand still outstretched. 'Please. We just want to talk.'

It looked, for a moment, like Ryuu would go for it. Something flickered across his face, a split second before the Plot loosely drawn across the room snapped taut.

'Zeshin!' The door was flung open, light suddenly flooding in. 'We found the teacher! You have to come, now!' The man standing there was panting, words coming out in a wheeze.

Raiku perked up. 'Yamada?' she asked at the same time as Daisukenojo. She may as well have asked"Deus ex Machina" for all the function their teacher was serving.

Still, though. Even the idea of Yamada was reassuringly solid in her mind. An anchor-point for their whole team that they could steady themselves around.

As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw that the man in the doorway was bleeding. His face looked like—

Raiku peered at him. 'Oh, no,' she said. 'That's definitely a shattered eye socket.'

'Does look like Yamada's handiwork,' Daisukenojo mused, because yes, it did look like the man's face had gotten caught in a landslide.

'He's… he attacked us from the north forest, I had to leave Tai and Doumi there to keep him busy,' the man managed to get out, before sinking to one knee. There was blood seeping down his side from an injury high on his back, but even Raiku could notice the stiff swelling starting around his abdomen, hunched over as he was.

Internal bleeding probably. Seemed about right. Even if Yamada didn't fully hit you, the power behind that kind of attack would do damage no matter how lightly it landed.

'Wait!' Daisukenojo exclaimed, lunging just enough to catch Zeshin's pant leg. Zeshin froze, then slowly turned towards him. Daisukenojo ignored the ominous look and powered through. 'Yamada specialises in wide-scale destruction, he's going to kill all of you without us!'

Zeshin's face went from ominous to irritated, but it was Ryuu's turn to cut in.

'We know exactly what kind of damage he can do,' he said. 'If he sees us, he'll realise we're not harmed and stop attacking. He must have figured out you're holding us prisoner.'

Conveniently, the man by the door chose this moment to collapse. Kanji rushed to his side but Raiku, who'd seen the Plot discreetly kick his legs out from under him, just side-stepped him on her way out. 'Well, time's a-wasting,' she said cheerfully. 'We should probably sort this out.'

When she turned to look where she was going, she yelped to find Byakko already standing there.

'Oh, like you're going without me,' he snorted at her obvious shock.

Ryuu shoved her aside to look Byakko in the eye. He glared.

Raiku rubbed her shoulder. 'God, the Drama,' she muttered. 'Let's just go already.'

Daisukenojo fished a knife out of his bag and held it up meaningfully. 'Let's get armed and go,' he corrected.

Raiku flushed. 'Yes. Weapons. Agreed.'

This was already going super well.

 

 

 

 

 

'Well, fuck.'

Daisukenojo did have a gift for summarising their circumstances, Raiku noted, because that about did it.

Well. Fuck.

While whatever concealment that kept the Takeshita compound secure hadn't failed, it was only a few minutes of flat-out running before Yamada's presence had made itself known. Raiku, who had racked up about two solid days of scouring the forest by that point without ever having gotten close to the compound, couldn't help but be impressed. He hadn't been off by much.

But then, with this kind of destructive capability, he didn't need to be that accurate. They had come across a vast swathe of broken, shattered trees, broken logs sticking up like claws into the sky. Scattered through the detritus were sudden outcroppings of rock, huge spikes jutting upward. The chaos stretched out from their feet as a splintered, uneven wasteland.

No, no need for accuracy. It would be like bothering to aim at a fly when your weapon was a meteor.

Raiku couldn't help but feel that it was a little hypocritical. So what, it was fine when  _Yamada_  got to destroy a forest but when  _she_  did it, then it was a bridge too far?

This reaction was not shared by the people with her. 'Doumi?' Byakko asked, stepping forward and squinting.

She could see a dark-clad figure in the distance, enormous enough to seem closer than he was. Spotting their erstwhile teacher was made easier by the desolate wasteland he'd apparently spent some time preparing for them. It wasn't like anyone else was really built on such a scale, and the sight of his giant, immovable form made the knot of tension between her shoulders start to unwind. Doumi must have been the person he was holding up by the throat. Whoever Tai was, she couldn't spot them.

'Yamada!' Raiku shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. He shook the person in his grip like a ragdoll before dropping them. Their limbs were disturbingly limp even from that distance; they crumpled as they hit the ground and did not rise again. Yamada half-turned towards them. Raiku tried to take a step forward but something stopped her. She looked down to see Zeshin's arm outstretched, catching her across the chest.

'No,' he said. 'Something's wrong.'

'Nah, he always looks like that,' Daisukenojo said dismissively, pushing past them. 'Hey Yamada! What the hell took you so long?!' he called, lifting an arm to wave. 'We're fine, no thanks to you!'

It was easy to forget that a man, any man, of Yamada's size wasn't necessarily slow. He used it to his advantage a lot. People assumed he was slow, physically and mentally, and Yamada sat back and listened and watched and when he was ready, they never saw him coming. After so many years spent trying and failing to run from him, it was one mistake that Raiku had always sort of assumed she wouldn't make. But he was in front of them before she'd registered him moving.

Raiku took a single step forward and then, when she really saw him, two steps back.

It was Yamada. There was no mistaking him. That wasn't the issue.

'Yo, Yamada!' Daisukenojo repeated, waving a hand in front of their teacher. 'You alright in there?'

She thought for a second that Plot had gotten him, the same Plot clearly fighting for real estate on Byakko and Zeshin, but it wasn't right. It didn't  _look_  right. It was Plot but it was almost opaque and it wasn't moving properly. It was stuck over Yamada in a shape like old webs, abandoned by their spiders long ago. Decrepit. Impressions of it were trailing off it in wisps, muted and faded, warped like an old photograph.

'Yamada?' Daisukenojo asked, starting to frown and Raiku just tilted her head and tried to listen, tried to make something coherent out in the haze.

_an un-scarred mouth twists beneath a white mask he promised her_ _**I promised her** _

It was already over, she realised. The Plot had already concluded. It had been done and over and gone and now, impossibly, it had been summoned from nothing. From that graveyard of the Genematrix that no one had ever seen.

'What's going on?' she asked faintly, and Yamada raised a hand. The ground started to rumble. She could feel something just there in the narrative weave, hovering on the periphery, something so achingly familiar she could almost taste it, could almost name it as—

_**there's just one way for this to end, Suzu** _

—violence.

'Scatter!' Daisuke shouted as the earth yawned open beneath them. Raiku leapt free in time to land safely, crouching immediately in readiness to jump again.

She heard a raised voice that she somehow knew was Byakko, barely audible over the noise. 'What's going on?!'

Raiku grasped for something believable, something, anything to explain why they could feel no chakra but Yamada still wasn't in his right mind. 'It must be the thing that grabbed us! The same thing as before, it's still got him!' She winced—hardly a good improvisation. Fortunately, it was hard enough to think with Yamada just looking at you, let alone bearing down on you. She'd just have to rely on that. That and the Plot still trailing after the three Drama magnets they had with them, trying desperately to find a reason for this sudden abomination to fit into its storyline.

'Yamada! It's us, snap out of it!' Ryuu yelled, vanishing in a blur of wind before a spike of earth erupted from where he'd been.

Raiku lunged and managed to catch a tail end of the trailing, resurrected Plot, quickly disintegrating in her hands with a flash of electricity and the smell of burning. It felt wrong, ashy and fragile rather than slick. Wrong.  _Wrong_. It wasn't dying the way a normal Plot did when a Gairano touched it, just fragmenting, hollow and brittle like dead leaves.

Shit.

'Don't you dare fucking kill him!' Daisukenojo bellowed across the field, but Zeshin was already in a fighting stance, hands flashing together in unknown combination.

Yamada didn't respond to the impending attack from Zeshin. Instead he dragged Ryuu out of the air and into tangibility somehow, a massive hand wrapped around his knee. Ryuu was yanked unceremoniously down, the leaner shinobi crashing down into Yamada but curling in the air even as he fell, knives thrown outward. Byakko appeared immediately inside Yamada's space, fingers glowing brightly and a hand boosting Ryuu out of Yamada's grip before he could crush Ryuu's limb in his hand. Yamada turned and dodged all but one blade, which sank harmlessly into the thick muscle of his bicep. And then Zeshin was suddenly there as well. It was almost beautiful for a moment, even to Raiku, who had never thought violence would be. Byakko and Zeshin were made for Ryuu and they were always where he wasn't, moving in perfect synchronicity to counter, to strike, and lash out where Yamada was vulnerable.

Following some invisible signal, Byakko suddenly dragged Ryuu back, both of them vanishing only to reappear far further away. Zeshin's hands came together and Yamada crashed into an invisible wall. The impact made the ground shake before he rebounded off it and skidded to a halt several metres back.

'Get back to the compound!' Zeshin shouted, hands again forming seals too quickly for Raiku to take in.

No, that wasn't going to happen. Raiku tore her gloves off along with half her sleeve by mistake, scanning the ground desperately to try and figure out where this was going. Rather than where the fight was going, which was always going to be her mistake.

'Look out!'

A red blur crashed into her side, shoving her out of the way as Yamada appeared with a flash in front of her. Raiku, thrown clear, grabbed at the ground to steady herself and saw Daisukenojo suddenly come into Yamada's path. He countered the first bone-shuddering hit and parried quickly, the two of them exchanging a series of blows that would have snapped Raiku in half like a twig.

_nowhere but here for me Yama_ _**I promised** _

Yamada's form blurred, dragged forwards by Plot ineffability—whatever the fight this had once been, Yamada had not lost. An arm coming from the left was suddenly on the right and in his panic, Daisukenojo threw his arm up to block. He blocked instead of jumping back, years of conditioning doing him no favours; the blow didn't hit his sternum where it would have collapsed his ribcage, but  _crack!_  The bone of his forearm visibly bent, all wrong, beneath the force of the hit and Daisukenojo cried out in pain, buckling to one knee under the weight of Yamada's still outstretched arm, under the force of the sudden pain.

Yamada slowly raised his arm, almost absently deflecting Daisukenojo's hasty, limited swipe with the knife in his functional hand. He shifted his weight back just slightly, a motion they'd seen a thousand times. Raiku was already there, propelled more by power than her feet. Thunder rolling in the air behind her, she slammed into Yamada, electricity surging through his exposed skin.

'Go!' she yelled to Daisuke, feeling the power distorting, drowning out her voice. The vast network of Yamada's nervous system lay out before her but he was moving, he was still  _moving_. Raiku realised her mistake immediately: any more than this and she'd kill him. But it wasn't enough to stop him.

And just like that, Yamada wasn't in front of her, he was behind her- she narrowly ducked a punch like the fist of an angry god, swung back just in time to avoid a following kick. She launched forward for the mesh of Plot wrapped around his throat but she could already feel chakra gathering around his body, in preparation for strike she couldn't safely block. Not if she didn't want to kill him.

It would be so easy, she thought distantly, and instead she wrapped her hand in Plot that gave like burnt paper beneath her fingers. It dragged free of his throat and there was still so much left that she could have despaired. She wrapped her bare hands around the knife still embedded in his shoulder and felt energy pour through it, felt him convulse and spasm, smelt the blood where the skin was splitting. She pressed closer in a desperate bid to expose as much of the Plot to her as possible, watched it flake off him in pieces.

Still not enough.

She couldn't do it, Raiku realised, her body wouldn't do it; she couldn't only half-kill a man.

'Raiku, get back!' Byakko was suddenly in her space, wrapping a hand around her arm like it was nothing, like it was  _nothing_  to touch that kind of raw electrical energy. He yanked her towards him and a wind that felt like a physical blow had them abruptly out of the way of an impact that shook the air with a deafening bang.

As the dust cleared, she saw them.

Zeshin had sunk to one knee, both hands outstretched and clawed in the form of an alien technique. Yamada stood suspended, bloodied arm drawn back to strike. She saw the thick muscles of his shoulder flex but he didn't, couldn't move, a titan held in suspended animation. There was still electricity crackling through his body, seizing him in shudders that he just ignored, that he didn't seem to feel. Another aborted motion from Yamada and one of the long bones in Zeshin's hand shifted with a crack and broke, skin discolouring around it.

'Kill. Him,' Zeshin gritted out.

A pale and bloodied man in green stepped—limped—forward but Ryuu turned and punched him swiftly in the gut, easily ducking the retaliatory strike and following up with a swift kick to the side of his knee that landed with a crunch. The man went down with a cry and Daisukenojo was suddenly at her side between her and Byakko, broken arm still held protectively to his midriff. Crouched in readiness, good hand curled into a fist. Byakko settled into a more defensive stance, shoved backwards by Daisuke's sudden appearance. Raiku found herself on the ground with her teammate, pushed off-balance in the same way and limbs trembling from the exertion, resisting that impossible call to just take whatever Yamada had and crush it in a blue-white grip.

Tension suddenly sparked to life where there had been none, and Raiku saw too late the Dramatic Confrontation that it had all been building towards.

They'd been helping, she thought. They'd been helping. Zeshin had pushed her back on her feet and Byakko had thrown himself headfirst to save Ryuu, to stop him from an injury that would have crippled him even if he'd lived and they'd been  _helping_  because the Plot said they were family and that still meant something. A decrepit trail of Plot caught her eye on the way past and Raiku dove, lashed out and, fingers scrabbling at the ground, she felt the Plot pass through them

_blood smell fear cold hands_ _**Suzu** _ _**I promise never again I promise I promise I** _

and it gave way in her grip.

In front of her, through the blood seeping down into her eyes from her forehead, Yamada froze. The black pits of his eyes shone once, then began to slowly clear.

He blinked once, then again. Swallowed roughly.

'… Yamada?' Daisukenojo asked cautiously, half-crouched over her with his good arm raised defensively.

Yamada's head jerked. His eyes flicked over them, his brow creasing.

His fingers twitched at his side. He lifted them to look at them uncertainly. It was a profoundly unnatural look for Yamada to wear, but it wasn't that eerie blankness.

'I think… I think it's over?' Raiku said with less sincere uncertainty, though she knew damn well it was; the ashy feel of a long-dead Plot was already fading from her hands. Zeshin stepped into view.

'I agree,' he said, and the knife flashed in his hand when he raised it overhead. A cry tore itself out of Raiku's throat and she just registered Daisukenojo dragged clear of her sudden surge of electricity, but a hand flashed to intercept before she could push herself off the ground.

Ryuu gripped Zeshin's wrist, the two of them tensed to push against each other. 'He was being controlled!' he snapped, knuckles white with the effort of keeping Zeshin's arm still. 'It's over now! We stopped him!'

Zeshin tried to yank his arm back but Ryuu didn't let go. 'I'm not taking the chance, I'm not risking our family!'

'My family is  _dead_!' Ryuu shouted and Zeshin didn't flinch, not the way Byakko did in her peripheral vision. A moment of tension between their arms before Ryuu broke it, shoving Zeshin bodily away from him and Yamada. 'Touch him and I swear to god, I swear to  _god_  I'll finish the job!' There was a look in his eye that Raiku didn't, could not possibly have recognised, but she felt it resonate deep down.

 _That_.

'Stop it,  _now_!' Byakko appeared between them, a hand extended towards each of them. 'Enough!' he snapped. 'Uncle, he's dealt with!'

Zeshin opened his mouth but Byakko made a chopping motion and  _turned his back on Ryuu_. 'You know that Ryuu'll never trust us if you do this! You have to stop!' He threw a hand back at Ryuu, at the fine webbing of bruising still around his eyes and throat. The marks now almost vanished under the damage the fight had done. 'He's our family, stop  _hurting_  him!' Byakko shouted.

Zeshin finally flinched. The blackness of the Plot around him started to recede and before Raiku's captivated gaze, started to drift towards Byakko. Zeshin's eyes slowly, almost reluctantly, landed on Ryuu, and his expression twisted.

'Seiryu, I,' he began, and faltered.

Ryuu glared at him.

'…Ryuu,' Zeshin said. A kind of dawning horror began to crawl across his face.

Raiku had seen it before. She'd seen Ryuu's face once, standing in hell, looking at her like he could throw her away and never think of her again. And then the same look that Zeshin wore now, when the Plot withdrew and there was nothing left but what he'd done, been willing to do because it asked him to.

The hairs started to stand up on the back of Raiku's neck. There was a still, sickly feeling of wrongness rising in the air. She was naturally, natively repulsed by this overt display of Dramatic tension, the Plot clearly scrawling out the next steps. It was too close to a Dramatic Climax for a Gairano, and for a moment that was explanation enough.

Lightning started building again under her skin, too close to the surface still after she'd hauled herself back from doing what came naturally.

'Hey,' Daisukenojo said warningly. 'Raiku, what's going on?'

'Something's not right,' she tried to tell him, words thick and heavy in her mouth, but there was no answer.

Not from Daisukenojo, anyway. Ryuu's Plot shuddered as if in reply, but it wasn't its amalgamated voice she heard.

'I didn't think it would be that straightforward. But it's not hard for you at all, is it?'

Raiku closed her eyes for a moment when she heard him. She let the silence stretch on. It felt almost physical, like the quiet was trying to close in.

When she looked up, Tsuji wasn't where she expected to see him. She pushed herself to her feet, awkwardly ducking around the frozen Daisukenojo to stand. He'd sounded close, but there were only the statues he'd made of her teammates and Ryuu's family, stuck in a Dramatic confrontation that should have been moving forward. There was no wind, no ambient sound; the crack of broken branches underfoot sounded painfully loud.

After a few moments of looking around, she could make out a figure far away and half-hidden in the treeline. If there was any doubt that it was Tsuji, rather than another convenient family member to appear for illustrative purposes during the showdown, it was quickly dispelled when they raised their hand in a slow wave.

This is a trap, she told herself.

But she still stepped forward.

It seemed to take forever. Raiku wasn't slow, even at a walking pace; she had naturally long legs and wasn't particularly patient by nature. But dread seemed to weigh her down, layered over that curious sense of rage and emptiness that she had so quickly come to associate with even the sight of Tsuji. He had vanished by the time she reached the trees but that same growing, dark feeling pulled her further into woods toward some hidden point, pulling her past the trees that had escaped Yamada's wrath until she came to a more natural break in the forest.

Tsuji lifted his head, gaze distant.

Grey eyes, she saw. Had they been grey, before? Had they been grey, or green, or any colour, really? She couldn't recall. She couldn't picture his face in her mind. He was so close now, and she still couldn't do it.

'The Genematrix, and… Plot?' Tsuji asked, slow like he could taste the words in his mouth. Like he was trying it to see if he liked it. 'And it's… stories. It's fate in patterns.'

Raiku felt the blood drain from her face.

No. She hadn't said anything. She'd told him nothing. It wasn't  _possible_.

'What?' she whispered.

'So I'd be… what,' he asked, meeting her gaze. 'A Plot Hole, I suppose?' He smiled slightly. Bitterly. 'I suppose I could see that.'

He was insane. He was insane. He was  _insane_  but he knew things now, he knew things she'd never told him. That she couldn't have. No one could know; no mind but a Gairano's had ever known the Genematrix and been able to hold onto it.

He couldn't. Tsuji  _couldn't_  be the exception.

'What did you just say?!' she demanded.

Tsuji threw his hands out towards the Plot chaos that Yamada and their fight had wrought, broken inky trails leeching sluggishly across the ground. 'I didn't know what else to do. You wouldn't talk to me, you wouldn't—' He broke off, shoving a hand through his hair in a frustrated gesture that  _didn't belong to him_.

She fisted her hands at her sides. 'You…' Raiku looked down and around at the lines of Plot she had broken, seeping back the way to rejoin the Genematrix. What she had always known they did but—...no.

They hadn't, had they? They'd come back to Tsuji.

The damage she'd done to it was written out in its decrepit mass, splayed out like a Gairano fingerprint across its surface. 'You… set this up?' she asked. 'You… You did this? To Yamada, you…' She clenched her hands into fists. She could feel the horror distorting her features. 'You fed him to Plot so you could watch me break it, so you could sit there and read what I was  _doing_ —'

'No,' he said loudly, eyes wide and dark. Manic. 'Don't look at me like that, don't you  _dare_  look at me that way. You  _know_ what it's like, you know what I've been through.'

Raiku shook her head, stepping back. 'I don't,' she said faintly. 'No one can do what you did.'

Tsuji recoiled. She fought the sudden, irrational feeling that she'd betrayed him.

'No,' he repeated.

Raiku's skin was glowing and crackling and she moved forward again, her steps heavy with grim purpose. But the world swam when she tried to put her foot down on seemingly ordinary ground, the world blackening and twisting around the edges before she staggered back. She hissed and settled on more stable ground, checking around her for the Plot he must have been trying to trick her into.

'Haven't you seen enough?' she demanded. 'How many lines do you have to cross before you get the message?!'

Tsuji smiled at her, the line of his mouth twisted with something like regret. 'You can't see it, can you.' It wasn't a question and no—confusingly, infuriatingly, she couldn't see anything where she had tried to walk.

Raiku's nails dug into her palms, hard enough to hurt.

'God,' he said softly. 'You really are so alone.'

Raiku snapped, she hurled her words out like a weapon. 'You're the one who's alone! You had to hunt me down and trap me here, all because you've deluded yourself into thinking we're connected when we're  _not_!'

Tsuji hummed, a strange, neutral sound. A tune with too many accidentals, sharps where she expected none. It set her teeth on edge and she searched the ground desperately with her eyes, with every sense she thought would tell her something, but there was nothing.

There was  _nothing_.

Plot slid across the earth irregularly, pushed away by Tsuji's presence. Trying to escape him, but caught in whatever it was he had done. A long strand twisted and shuddered in the space between them before it flattened, spiralling and changing direction.

Raiku's breathing slowed. She narrowed her eyes, stepping back again.

The black waves of Narrative stretching away from Tsuji were warping before they could reach her, shifting in a way that was triggering something in the back of her mind. Something familiar and something  _important_ , but that was just out of reach.

It was something her dad had said. It was something he had told her, she could even see the  _look_  on his face when he said it; what had he said? He'd held something and it was significant enough that he wasn't smiling in her memory. He'd held something, and she'd watched the lights and—

The lights.

Raiku found she was shuddering.

Yes. He had explained it to her once. He'd shown her that trick that school teachers used, with a crystal and a white light breaking into different pieces on the other side of it. He'd told her that a Device was not a thinking thing, not an active one, but it changed things anyway, the crystal casting rainbows on her face.

It built up in her chest until it exploded out of her chest in a scream, in lightning lashing out and hurtling into nearby trees. 'You son of a bitch!' The electricity lashed and flickered across the invisible frame of whatever Plot Device he'd managed to, to  _find_  or to somehow  _drag_ here to them. Which was  _impossible,_  because Devices didn't… they didn't react like Plots, they didn't shift the way Plots did in their impermanence and flexibility, they couldn't just  _up and move_ because they had to appear where they were needed for things to  _work_. 'What have you done?!'

'I am trying to  _help you_!' Tsuji shouted, his weakened composure cracking even further. 'Why?!' That yawning darkness was open behind his eyes, dizzying and empty. 'Why isn't it working, why don't you understand?!'

'Which one is it?!' she demanded, jabbing her finger at where that empty space was twisting and refracting Plot faster now. Like whatever Tsuji was doing was wearing off, like it was getting greedier the more she spoke of it. 'Which Device did you hijack?!'

Which Plot had he derailed? What story couldn't fall into place without it sitting there, invisible and alien and refracting the Plots that passed through it until they were something new, something that could  _work?_

She didn't bother to ask how he'd done it; it, like so many things about Tsuji, was simply impossible. But she had to know which one, she had to tell her father because what if it had been important? What if he was depending on it to understand the wider Genematrix plans, and now it was nowhere to be found? What if it was one of the Devices that were singular, unique, like so many of them seemed to be?

'Why?' he demanded. 'Afraid you'll recognise it?!'

'Why did you even bring me here?!' Raiku countered. 'What did you think—that attacking me, that attaching that  _thing_  to Yamada, that any of that would make me help you?!' She lunged out of the way just before a Plot surged to where she had stood, suddenly accelerated on its way out of the Device. She leapt up and over a crack in the earth and then swung up onto a branch, safely out of its way. The sky seemed to blur and darken for a moment, fading to grey before returning to blue.

Tsuji shook his head, he fisted his hands in his hair. 'It doesn't matter what we do, it's never what we  _do_ ,' he cried out, pleading with her to understand. 'It's what we  _are_!'

He could have been enraged, could have been on the verge of tears, she couldn't tell. Her eyes weren't trained enough. She wasn't  _good_  at this, she couldn't tell what he wanted. She could barely think past her sudden knowledge of the Device between them, that thing the Gairano couldn't see but knew enough of to fear.

But she knew what she wanted. 'Just shut up!' she howled, a roar sounding in her ears. Like thunder, rolling over itself. 'Just  _shut up!_ '

The world started wavering and blackening around the edges like there was some great Plot there but there wasn't, she would have seen it.  _She would have_   _seen_ , she had time to think, before it shifted around her, surging out of nowhere. She turned in time to see it rise, a great wave of blackness like a tidal wave, blocking out the sun.

And then there was just the darkness.

Raiku turned in place in the void, checking for anything to mark her surroundings by, but no matter how much light she produced, nothing made itself clear. She could hear the dim thrumming of it surging beneath in her skin as power built, could hear her breathing echo as if she were in some great, empty space.

'You have no idea what it's like.' Tsuji's murmur ripped past her ear, too quickly swallowed up by the black. She spun and saw nothing, lit as brightly as she could but casting no shadow, illuminating nothing. Nothingness.

An exhale, a crack, that thin thread finally fraying and snapping on a sob. 'None.'

And she was alone in the pitch-black world, standing in that emptiness.

The light faded, her breaths just echoed off nothing. There was nothing there but what she made herself, realised, and then it seemed to fall in on her again.

 

 

 

 

_You are Tsuji._

_You are five years old and a monster wearing your mother's face has entered the room. 'Hello, love,' she says in a voice like bees buzzing, a roar of noise building and intensifying as you scramble back, as you open your mouth and scream and scream and scream. You want your mother. You want this doll made of string and static to leave but she comes closer, reaches her blurring hand towards your face._

' _What's wrong?' she asks and the threads whisper to you what they are made of, what she will do when they ask, show you that they will drag her into place._

_And you are screaming._

_You cannot un-see._

 

 

 

 

_You are Tsuji._

_You wake up one morning wearing a stranger's face. You stop when you see yourself in the mirror, you touch your fingers to the skin of your cheeks. Gently at first and then harder. Your ribs won't move enough for you to inhale properly, your breath escapes hard through your nose because you cannot open a stranger's mouth to make way for the shrieking inside you._

_There is a man in the room with you now. He touches your shoulder. His body is caught in threads and hooks that tug his mouth to shape words. Static pours from it and out of his skin, is pulled to flooding out of him. You reach behind you and clutch the sink pressing into your back, your hand grasps something thin and cold. You want him to be quiet, you want him to be_ gone _and you lash out. He looks down and you know what he is looking at, you realise what you have done. There is warmth seeping over your hand. His face is growing pale._

_You don't know him, but he looks at you and you have betrayed him. You don't know him. He takes so long to die._

_The threads don't dissolve. They don't release him when his eyes glaze over._

 

 

 

 

_You are Tsuji._

_Your life is made of lives, now. You fill the void where fate is absent, you are forced onwards and fill spaces until it finds you again, when it pushes against your new form, pushes that life into place and pushes you out. It will not leave you but you cannot bend, you cannot breathe, pressed to suffocating where you fell through the cracks in fate._

_You are so tired._

 

 

 

 

_You are Tsuji, but are you? Were you? You are Tsuji. You are, you are, you are._

 

 

 

 

_You are Tsuji._

_You have had another face, another life yanked from you by the time you see your own again, your true face (once-face) smiling at someone else, you see your life from across the street hooked and bound in black threads and white noise. The threads that wrap around the world and twist, shift when you look at them. You grasp and claw at them and they may bend but they do not break. They will curve and bend to escape you, will distort and change shape if they must but they do not falter. They lead somewhere and lie too thickly on the path for you to follow. You struggle and shriek and you scratch but they lead somewhere you cannot go. You are not welcome there. There is no place for you here, you are surrounded at all times, on all sides._

_You will not have this face for long, you know. You cannot keep even this._

 

 

 

 

_You are Tsuji._

_You start to warn people again, you start to tell them of the great and terrible things you see them pulled towards, the ignominious ends and dying gasps. They do not run, they come closer, and they_ thank _you, they_ pay _you. They start to come in droves and the threads wrap themselves around the people clustered around you, closer and closer. They will not suffer you. Not ever and not like this. You keep speaking and warning and you are never wrong—no._

_You are wrong just once._

_She is ordinary. She is a girl in the crowd and you are so used to the dark that the shape of her is wrong, all wrong. She is not static or black thread, she is blinding-bright and made of edges and hunger and the string of fate catches on her as she leaves and_

_it_

_snaps._

_She is gone by the time you free yourself from the crowd. You saw her. She was real._

_You saw._

_You will see again. You have never been less alone than this._

 

 

 

 

 

_you are Tsuji (who are you who are you who are you who are you)_

_there is a hole in the world in the shape of you_

 

 

 

 

 

_You are_

No.

_No?_

No.

No.

No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO.

The rising, deafening roll of thunder. A shape made of lightning and teeth, ripping and shrieking and roaring, exploding out of the dark.

 **NO**.

 

 

 

 

Raiku opened her eyes to blinding light, a wave of electricity washing back over her and settling back into her skin with a satisfied hum. She exhaled shakily. She was sore from the fight with Yamada, with hot spots of inflammation promising bruises tomorrow but there was something different. The rush of energy beneath her skin felt stretched and wired, like a well-used muscle after a long day.

It was almost serene. And then she heard the gasping.

She was sitting up before she realised she had moved.

Tsuji's teeth were blood-washed white in his burnt-black face when he parted his lips to speak. The glimpse of his mouth looked wrong, looked obscenely red and raw through his blackened, scorched lips. He rattled on the exhale; a wet gurgle sounded low in his chest. She stumbled over to him on uncertain legs. He couldn't possibly see her but she felt his gaze, from eyes so tired their weight seemed to settle in her stomach. She sank to her knees next to him, her entire body trembling.

'I knew you'd be the end of me.' His voice was almost recognisable. A rough, agonised rasp, the weak swallow around liquid in his chest. His lips twitched, impossibly. 'We can't help it. Neither of us.' He coughed, hard, and the motion shook his body so painfully that Raiku's skin crawled in sheer visceral horror.

'What?' she asked, whispering but not sure why. It was just the two of them. 'What do you know?'

 _What do you think you know_ , she should have asked, she  _knew_  she should have asked, but it felt wrong.

He knew something. He knew.

Red lines appeared in those black lips. She realised with horror that Tsuji was trying to smile, the ruined skin pulling taut and cracking. Cracked open.

She'd cracked him open.

'They're hard to see,' he wheezed painfully. 'They bend things. Change shapes.'

Raiku wanted to shake him. She wanted to close her eyes. She wanted to wrap her arms around her chest and squeeze this feeling out and she wanted to push her hands over his mouth and finish him off, she wanted him to say something that made  _sense_  and she wanted him to stop talking and just be  _silent_ and—

And she wanted him to stop looking at her like that, like she was some lonely, lovely thing worthy of gentleness from him, and not the one who'd torn him apart.

She'd stopped breathing. Her lungs were starting to burn.

She could hear her heart, pounding in her ears.

'It's not what we do, Raiku,' he rasped with unbearable gentleness and she saw that pain-red flash of his mouth again, the pink-washed colour of blood-stained teeth. 'You don't destroy.'

The inside of her head was filling with a red, hot static but she could still hear his every word perfectly, each painful syllable piercing through the din. Piercing through the agonising, disjointed feeling in her head of Tsuji, of having been Tsuji.

Of having been something wrong in the world, and the strange familiarity of it.

It would have been fond, the look he gave her, in a person less destroyed. In a body less crumbling around the edges. A sad, fond smile, seeping blood. 'You are destruction,' Tsuji told her. His hand was suddenly in hers. She hadn't realised she was moving this time either. 'And it's alright.' That gurgle in his chest. That wet sound of blood sticking in his throat. 'It's alright.

'We know what we are,' he sighed, he rasped, he came to an end. 'We know.'

Tsuji's body was starting to disappear under her hands, his features disappearing into a more generic, featureless corpse, into the sea of blackness he'd shown her that was already fading at the edges. A Plot Hole resolving. She frantically grasped at him but her grip slid free immediately, sliding off a face that was nothing like his, a body that was not and had never been Tsuji.

'No, no no no!' she cried, and tried to touch his face before it vanished and she was left with a stranger, the body of someone else.

Gone.

Just like that.

Raiku realised she was gasping for air, that her body was shuddering with great, painful breaths. She could hear her heart pounding, feel her fingers shaking where she'd buried them in the ground. He was gone. He'd been so wrong and terrible and  _lonely_  and there was nothing even  _left_  of him.

He'd been so afraid.

'I found her!' she heard Daisuke's distant shout. 'She's this way!'

And Raiku sat back on her heels and cried.


	68. far too few riceballs and mermaids

'Do you think she's okay?' came Daisukenojo's already lowered voice, further muffled by the door.

'Yeah, obviously, I think the crying is the ultimate sign of equanimity  _you goddamn idiot_.'

Daisukenojo, predictably raising his voice at Ryuu. 'I know it isn't, asshole!'

Raiku sniffled and rubbed her face into the pillow. It was almost enough to make her smile. Or it might have been had they all not taken one look at her in the woods, put their arguments on pause and then  _bundled her back to the compound and into emotional quarantine._

She wasn't even sure  _whose_  bedroom she'd been stuffed into. From how clean it was, she had a sneaking suspicion it was Zeshin's; that certainly made her feel less guilty about the sheer amount of snot and tears she was getting on the blanket she was clinging to like a beached mermaid. For all that it probably spoke to an unhealthy approach to emotional situations, her seclusion in the cool, dark room was a welcome reprieve. The world felt too hard and bright with her eyes so red and sore.

That was enough, she told herself sternly for the third or thirtieth time; that was  _quite_  enough crying. She'd never cried this much in her life and she was clearly just getting it out of her system. All the crying she'd obviously missed out on. She sniffled again and took a slow, steady breath in, pushing past the shuddering in her shoulders as she did so.

_It's alright. It's alright._

Raiku let out a wail half-muffled by the pillow, letting out a fresh flood of tears.

There was lots of shushing from the closed door, followed by further heated whispers. 'See what you did?!'

'That wasn't my fault!'

'You have to go in there, Hatori.'

' _I fucking do not_.'

'No, I think Ryuu has a point.'

'Oh shut the hell up, Byakko, you don't get a vote.'

'Stay out of this,  _Byakko_.'

'Oh cool, two against one, that's fair.'

'You were  _born_  two against one, assholes, as far as I'm concerned, you two are unfair to the  _world_.'

'Oh holy shit, that's low.'

'What the hell, Hatori?'

'Yeah, Ryuu got  _abducted_. Too soon, Hatori.'

'Would you two—that is—no, don't you,  _don't you dare—!'_

The door clicked open, letting a rectangle of yellow light spill across the floor. There was an awkward clatter before it decisively closed again and left her in darkness.

She heard Daisukenojo curse under his breath and she burrowed further into her makeshift nest.

Daisukenojo sighed. '…Raiku?' He asked tentatively. She felt the edge of the bed dip down under his weight. 'Uh. You are, um.'

He cleared his throat.

Raiku sniffled.

'I know you're really upset,' he said slowly, the words oddly practised. 'And I don't know why, and you don't have to tell me, but if you want to then you can.'

A beat.

'And if it's because of Ryuu and his stupid family drama, I promise I'll suckerpunch him right in his pretty-boy face.'

Raiku snorted. Well. She half-sniffed half-snorted, resulting in a sound no Character would have been caught dead making. 'Your mum sends you to check on your sisters a lot, huh?' she mumbled, voice thick.

Daisuke coughed. She could almost hear the blush. 'Yes.'

Raiku let out another undignified sound, wiping her nose roughly with her arm.

Daisukenojo's weight shifted a little in place. 'What can I,' he started, then tried again. 'What do you need?' He sounded more than a little desperate. 'What's gonna help, here?'

Raiku dragged the blankets more tightly around her body. 'I don't need anything.'

'Can you at least tell me if he hurt you?' he asked, leaning closer to her. She felt his hand gingerly touch the blanket over her shoulder. 'Are you gonna be okay?'

Raiku almost sobbed, but managed to bite it back just in time and with no small sense of bewilderment. He was being  _nice_ —there was no reason to start crying again, surely? She nodded instead of speaking.

The weight of his hand on her shoulder, over the blanket, was comforting. A heavy presence just resting there, something that wasn't the energy bouncing around inside her, looking for an outlet. She'd been readying herself for something, breaking down the barriers between her electrical force and the outside world, and it had gone nowhere. Tsuji had died so quietly, and then there were just these useless tears and the feeling that she'd missed something; that despite all she'd seen, she hadn't  _understood_.

The silence was companionable for a moment, in that sad, quiet fashion that a shared understanding often seemed to be.

'Are you sure you don't want me to punch Ryuu in the face?' Daisukenojo whispered.

Raiku's laugh came out only part-sob, which she was counting as a victory.

Daisukenojo huffed a little as well, patting her shoulder again. 'Do you want to get some rest instead?'

She nodded again and he withdraw his hand and stood.

'Okay. I'll check on you later, okay?'

'Okay,' she said thickly, and pulled the blanket up over her nose. She dimly registered him leaving, but was asleep before she could hear him speak again to whoever was waiting outside.

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku woke to the muffled sounds of shouting, coming from what seemed to be the floor below. The bed was shuddering slightly along with the walls, intermittent rumblings that seemed to match the yells. There was thin, weak daylight coming in through a crack in the blinds when she creaked an eye open. Her vision was slightly blurred, her eyes crusty and swollen, so she rubbed her face roughly with the blanket.

No Plot anywhere, she noticed wearily, dragging her gaze over the room before her. Nothing too big, then.

Another yell in a deeper voice, another shudder through the walls. A burst of wind slammed the external blinds against the window with a clatter.

Raiku thought about getting up. She thought about doing the shinobi thing and investigating the disturbance.

 _It's alright. It's alright_.

She shifted experimentally and her whole body ached. In a strangely removed way she felt sore, like pain had remained but the immediacy of it had somehow left.

She felt a thousand years old.

She exhaled heavily, feeling her ribcage contract and the electricity hum through the walls. It felt so structured and organised that it had reached what passed for electrically sedate, forming a more ordered counterpart to her own energy.

Raiku considered this, eyelids already drooping.

Another, less forceful shout. The deeper voice again.

Raiku relaxed heavily into the bed, rolling over onto her other side and away from the light.

If it was really important, they'd wake her for it.

 

 

 

 

 

_He looked at her with black eyes. Had Tsuji's eyes been black? Or brown, or grey?_

' _God,' he said softly. 'You really are so alone.'_

_And Tsuji smiled then, when before he had not._

 

 

 

 

 

It was weird, how too much sleep could feel like none at all.

She'd registered falling asleep and waking over and over, disturbed by various half-remembered goings-on in the house around her, maybe a dozen or more times. It all blurred together into one hazy, dreamless mass, and so when she woke again, it took a moment for her to even register that she was no longer sleeping.

It stuck, this time.

Raiku rolled onto her back and took a deep breath, rubbing her eyes.

The air was stale inside the room, she noticed for the first time. She hadn't opened a window when she'd been shoved in and she'd lost track of time, so god only knew how long she'd been in there. The low, wounded feeling she'd been wrapping herself in had eased enough for her to uncurl her limbs awkwardly. They twinged a little, having spent too long in one position.

After taking a moment to psych herself up, she rolled to the edge of the bed and onto her feet. She'd been still for so long that it was dizzying for a split second, like the ground was further than she'd expected, but then she was standing. Standing! Like a proper human being. She stretched and felt her joints pop, yawning and crossing the room.

Raiku opened the door and peered out into the dark hallway. Her pale glow lit an empty corridor, and she tentatively stepped out, only to hiss curses and clutch at the wall for balance as something clattered underfoot. She managed to regain her balance and squinted down, dropping into a crouch.

**DO NOT TOUCH, HATORI**

Ryuu's familiar sharp scrawl basically yelled at her from a note attached to the covered dish. Raiku reached for it, only to hesitate and double-check the note, quickly flipping it to make sure she wasn't similarly specified on the other side. Sure, someone had left this there—likely Ryuu, in a bizarre twist of fate—but he'd tricked her before. Always check both sides of the note, she had learnt the hard way.

Having confirmed that the coast was clear, she ignored the plate in favour of shuffling the six large riceballs into her arms, humming to herself. They were baked, as was her preference. Apparently the Takeshita family had not only produced Ryuu, but some excellent taste.

She glanced around again, mouth now reassuringly full of carbohydrates. She couldn't hear anyone. It was night-time, sure, but it wasn't  _that_  late…

Actually, what time was it?

After a quick search revealed no convenient timepieces, Raiku gave up and padded down the hallway in the dark, cradling her riceballs like they were her precious baby. Her precious, precious calorie baby.

She made her way down a set of stairs and immediately found herself back in familiar territory; this was Byakko's kitchen. Weirdly ominous in the dark and silence, like she was intruding somehow, but she could work with familiar.

Raiku stood in the dark for a moment, considering her options as she thoughtfully mowed through her riceballs. Six hadn't been enough, really. That was just neglectful. She could make more?

No, she decided. She wanted to be outside. She was sick of being in other people's houses and feeling like she was intruding.

 _She'd intruded on Tsuji's whole life_ , came the thought unbidden, and she made for the door instead of addressing the unwelcome inner voice. When the opened and she finally took a step outside, it felt like it was her first in what seemed like an age.

The courtyard beyond was dark but for the periodic torches, and there was a gentle wind rustling through the leaves. Raiku breathed in the fresh air, slumping in relief, then froze.

Zeshin was leaning against the porch railing with his back to her, apparently absorbing the night air like she was. Shit,  _Zeshin_ , were he and Ryuu still fighting?! Was she allowed to be out of the room?! Oh god, she had to get back inside. Raiku started to swivel, but the graceful fall of long, black hair down Zeshin's back shifted slightly as he turned.

It was too late; he'd seen her. Yellow eyes were looking at her gravely.

Zeshin was so picturesque, so striking in the torchlight, Raiku noted with ill-concealed distaste. But that was hardly his fault, so she tried not to hold it against him.

'He-ey,' she said awkwardly, then coughed when her voice came out unexpectedly hoarse.

Zeshin inclined his head. 'Good morning,' he said quietly.

Raiku flushed. 'Okay. Ha ha,' she said, shifting uncomfortably on the spot. 'I get it, I slept for ages.'

Zeshin raised his eyebrows. 'No.' He jerked his head out into the dark courtyard. 'It's 4AM, it's morning.'

'…Oh,' she said lamely. He gestured at the free mile or so of railing next to him. It took her a second to realise he was asking her to join him and she quickly tripped over herself to get there, like a  _normal person_ ,  _damnit Raiku_.

'How long…  _was_  I asleep, actually?' she asked, when the silence stretched to breaking point.

'A few days,' he said. 'It seemed to take a toll on you.'

Raiku quickly looked around for Plot, because there was no way this conversation was happening organically. What, her and the leader of the Drama were just happening to run into each other?

There was nothing. Nothing but the barest traces of Plot, wisps of narrative potential looking for actual stories to fill.

Raiku's mouth twisted uncertainly. Well… weirder things had happened? Her father had been on Uchiha Fugaku's genin team for an  _exceptionally_  brief period, and he'd come out of that fine. No machinations involved, though parent-teacher conferences had always been oddly tense when they met in the schoolyard going in.

She tapped her fingers on the wooden railing. Excellent. Without a Plot, did she just wait until it got awkward and then leave?

'Are you feeling better?' Zeshin asked, almost startling her out of her skin.

She shifted her weight from foot to foot, trying to hold off the urge to sprint back inside for what would seem, to Zeshin, like no reason. 'Uh. Yes?'

He tilted his head. Like an eagle studying a mouse it was about to disembowel and also belittle, maybe.

She endured a split second of this scrutiny before she cracked and threw her hands up. 'I don't know! I feel confused! I woke up and I was hungry and I haven't really thought about any of this and I just…' To her horror, she felt her eyes start to burn again. She fisted her hands in her hair. 'No! I'm done crying! I don't want to cry anymore! I've had enough!'

She heard Zeshin let out a long sigh. 'You're just a kid,' he said, more to himself than her.

Raiku didn't feel like a kid. At that moment, she just felt exhausted, dried out and eroded from the constant crying. Like a cliff standing against the sea.

Hands grasped her covered wrists, pulling them down. She opened her eyes, still feeling that treacherous moisture swimming there.

Zeshin regarded her solemnly. 'Was he going to hurt you?' he asked her.

'No,' Raiku said uncertainly.

'Was he going to hurt your people?'

'Yes,' she whispered.

Zeshin nodded. 'Then you did the right thing,' he said firmly. With his grave eyes and the eerie loveliness of his features, he seemed almost unreal. Like a statue, she thought again, and it was almost enough to make her pull away.

'But… he wanted to talk to me,' she said, voice cracking. But it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to tell Zeshin what she meant to say, because she had no idea what she meant. She couldn't express to Zeshin that feeling from Tsuji, that weight of years spent waiting alone for someone to look at him. She couldn't put into words how it felt to have failed the expectation that had lived in Tsuji, and that space in her mind even now that still felt waiting, like he was somehow still trying to tell her something she could not yet understand.

Zeshin nodded again, somehow seeming to understand anyway. 'Listen to me,' he told her. 'You're a shinobi. You've trained all your life to kill people and sometimes, they're not going to deserve it. Sometimes protecting your people, protecting your family, means hurting people who don't deserve to be hurt. This isn't a hero's life,' he said, looking at her properly then. 'It's not a right versus wrong life. If you're going to do this, you have to decide whether hurting people who would hurt what's yours is right  _enough_.'

It hurt, in that way that a true thing sometimes could.

Which made the fact that it was Zeshin saying it feel even stranger.

'Why are you helping me?' she asked, sniffling again and hating herself for it. It seemed to be a trend; people being nice to her when she'd already hurt them. People carving pieces of themselves out to give to her, when she'd already taken so much.

Zeshin let out another sigh. 'Do you promise not to tell the other little monsters?' he asked, looking out into the trees.

'Yes?'

He rolled his eyes, seemingly at himself. 'I don't like what we expect children to do, in the warrior's life,' he said with a somewhat self-conscious shrug. 'No matter how involved they think they were in that choice.'

'I wanted to be a shinobi,' she pointed out.

Zeshin gave her a weary look. 'No child understands what that means,' he said.

'You trained Byakko.'

He nodded, looking out over the courtyard. 'Yes,' he said. 'I did.'

That space in Raiku seemed to grow wider for a moment. Feeding from the silence.

Zeshin patted her on the shoulder. 'Don't stay out here too long,' he advised, pushing away from the railing. 'They'll start looking for you again soon, and you'll have to suffer through their "help".'

Raiku tried a smile, but it wobbled off her face before it could really do anything for either of them.

'If you're able, they wanted to leave in the morning.' Zeshin paused in the doorway. 'Early start,' he warned, before he walked inside and let the door swing closed behind him.

Raiku thought about that for a second. She'd been asleep for days, but she impossibly still felt tired. But she'd been awake, this time, however briefly.

Shower, she decided. Shower, then sleep. Their water tank might never recover, but they probably saw that coming.

Yawning, she headed inside.

 

 

 

 

 

'And you're really just letting us leave?'

Daisukenojo had surrendered his delicious meat-bread breakfast to Raiku the next morning. Since they'd put his arm in a cast at some point between the fight and that morning, this was probably the safest decision he could have made. She munched on it happily while he actually sussed out the finer points of their departure.

The consensus of Team Yamada seemed to be that they would never speak of Raiku's feelings again. She was basing that assumption off the careful, studied non-reaction of Daisukenojo to her appearance that morning, and also the minimal yelling that had accompanied her theft of his breakfast.

It felt too easy, she had to admit. But there were only faint, winding traces of Plot left, so it wasn't like she could trigger anything big.

'You're just going to help us get Yamada to the middle of the woods and leave,' Daisukenojo repeated, giving Zeshin the king of dubious looks. From a young man raised with Ryuu, the sheer impact of this expression could not be overstated. 'Leave us there. After all of this.'

Zeshin hadn't regained all his Plot-based aggression and blind zealotry, but his glare could still stop a man dead. 'No, I'd like the shinobi from the village who sent shinobi to kill my family to wake up in the middle of my family compound. And then to report to your village about it afterwards.'

'But we're taking Ryuu with us,' Raiku asked, just to confirm. 'And you're… fine with that.'

'Where is he, anyway?' Daisukenojo asked, leaning over the railing on the porch. 'You're not replacing him with Byakko again, are you?'

Byakko raised his hands where he was leaning against the wall of the house. 'Hey.' He sounded offended. 'He's saying goodbye to our grandparents, thanks.'

Daisukenojo's head snapped towards him. 'His grandparents are alive?!'

'He said that before, Ryuu almost got into a whole fight about it,' Raiku reminded him, licking a crumb off the paper wrapping for her food.

He gaped. 'What would they even be like?'

Byakko smiled.

Zeshin narrowed his eyes.

Daisukenojo hastily looked up at the sky. 'Good day to travel,' he said innocently.

'It's not without compromise,' Zeshin said, still giving Daisukenojo a suspicious look. Like at any second, he would cast aspersions on Zeshin's parents.

God. Zeshin's parents. What would they even be like?

Zeshin started to turn her way and Raiku hastily looked at the ground.

'Ryuunosuke has agreed to remain in contact with us on a provisional basis,' Zeshin continued. 'And you have all agreed that if a word of this place or these people reaches your superiors, I will personally—look at me, Gairano,' he said, staring at her, 'If even  _one word_  of this is breathed outside these walls, I will  _personally_  come to your village and kill everyone you've ever loved.'

'Why me specifically?!' she asked.

'Yeah, she's a compulsive secret-keeper,' Daisukenojo agreed. 'It's my family you should be threatening.'

'Was it the crying?' Raiku worried. 'Did it soften me too much?'

'You  _are_  soft.'

Raiku didn't jump, but she did screw her eyes shut and tense. 'Why?' she gritted out. 'Why do people like sneaking up on me so much?!'

Ryuu padded up the steps, his bag already over his shoulder. 'Because you look like a startled critter every time. Are you ready to go?'

Raiku rolled her eyes. Apparently her crying-induced leeway was already over, because this earned her a stomp on the foot as Ryuu passed.

'Are you ready to transport Yamada?' he asked, ignoring her hissing and hopping around. 'We're taking him to the clearing you blew up. Should sell any story about a fight long enough for us to get him home to Konoha for medical attention. Once the report's filed, case closed.'

'I don't think he'll buy it,' Daisuke said, with the loud, pointed tone of someone who had said it many times before.

Ryuu bared his teeth. 'But that's what we're doing, so you better  _sell_  it.'

'This seems too easy. Does this seem too easy?' Raiku asked no one in particular. 'What, we all have a fight and a cry and then suddenly all that interpersonal tension is gone?'

Ryuu glared at Daisukenojo, who innocently looked up again. 'Oh,' Daisuke said airily. 'I wouldn't say it was sudden?'

'We'll catch you up later, Toaster,' Ryuu growled.

'You were asleep for a while?' Daisukenojo remarked, all his sentences for some reason ending on rising notes like questions, like not sounding definitive would save him from Ryuu's wrath. 'And. There were things? That happened?'

Raiku felt oddly excluded. Likely because she  _had_  been excluded from the resolution process. Because she'd missed the conclusion of this particular narrative. 'What happened!?' she demanded. 'This makes no sense!' She followed after Daisukenojo as they made their way across the courtyard towards the gate, where Yamada was lying on a stretcher. She had identified him as the weak link in this baffling scenario and damnit, she wanted answers. Ryuu moved to the other side of the paved area to both pointedly ignore Byakko and speak to a small, much older woman, looking only mildly like he was being tortured.

Daisukenojo shoved a bag into her hands. 'Shut up!' he hissed as soon as Ryuu turned his attention away from them, a shocking change from his previous tone. 'They've been arguing for days and we're finally about to leave this nuthouse, okay? We'll tell you later!'

Raiku blinked at him owlishly, clutching the bag to her chest.

Daisukenojo turned back to Ryuu, now standing beside Byakko looking murderous, and resumed his cheerful expression. 'Right! Anything else we need to do?' he called, shrugging his own bag onto his shoulders.

Byakko smiled lazily. 'Just one.' And then Byakko stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Ryuu, hugging him tightly to his chest.

Raiku dropped her bag.

'He went for it!' Daisukenojo shrieked from the other side of the courtyard to The Great Embracening. 'He went for the hug!'

Raiku stepped back swiftly, putting Yamada's prone form between her and the twins.

Ryuu stared into space over Byakko's shoulder, stunned eyes so wide that she could see the whites all around his irises.

It looked like a good hug, Raiku observed beneath the screaming top layer of her consciousness. Byakko had strong arms and good hygiene. He seemed to be good at hugs.

He was still going to die. Definitely.

Byakko patted him on the back once then pulled back. 'You know how to reach me,' he said with his crooked smile.

Ryuu stared at him, clearly rendered mute under the force of his own inhuman rage.

'I'm gonna go,' Byakko said cheerfully, and vanished.

Ryuu opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again without saying a word.

Zeshin walked back towards him, Ryuu's pack held easily over one deceptively strong arm. He took in Ryuu's frozen state with a raised eyebrow, then raised his free arm as if to invite him in for a second hug. The drape of his coat made it look far more inviting than such an elegant motion should have. 'No?' he asked dryly when Ryuu continued staring into space. Raiku squinted and yes—his lips had twitched.

Okay.

That was unsettlingly humanising.

They had only a brief window before Ryuu snapped out of it enough to destroy Byakko for the hug and then kill them all for witnessing it. They had to leave or they'd be there for hours.

'Alright!' she said brightly, running over to stand behind Ryuu and giving him a light push so he stepped forward. 'Time to go! He'll write to you, or whatever he does! Let's be off!' Finally, her own chance to give Ryuu an unwelcome arc of correspondence,

Ryuu started a sort of shocked trudging. His mind may have been permanently broken, she worried, but it was too soon to tell.

Daisukenojo fell into step beside her while two Takeshita members tried to lift the stretcher with Yamada, eventually grabbing two more of their clansmen and moving into action.

'Are you going to be alright if we go back there, anyway?' Daisukenojo asked her quietly, giving her a hand to push Ryuu.

For a moment she was tempted to say no. To say that the shape of the tree Tsuji had stood before was too familiar, now, and that she couldn't bear to see the body in the corner now that it was a stranger.

But when she thought more carefully, it became clear that there was no real reason for her to refuse. It was a clearing, now; there was nothing left there that meant anything.

Raiku nodded. 'Yep!' she said. 'I'll be fine.'

She would be. She'd just have to make it work.

'Onwards!' she said to herself, squaring her shoulders.

 

 

 

 

 

Given how straightforward the entire summation of this Plot had been, she had sort of expected Yamada to wake up as soon as the Takeshita left, yet it took a disconcertingly realistic time. It was well into dusk by the time he finally stirred, but Raiku couldn't really hold that against him—his body had a lot more ground to integrity-check after a crisis.

Actually, she almost missed it. She'd meant to catch up on what had happened while she was asleep, while she could be sure that Yamada couldn't overhear. She had a dim recollection of shouting, of some sort of conflict that she'd decided to sleep through, but Daisukenojo was clearly reluctant to discuss it while The Hug was so fresh in Ryuu's mind and she was also tired and felt emotionally like a wrung-out dishtowel. So instead she'd been warping little balls of electricity between her fingers, matching them in patterns between her hands to keep herself amused.

The body that was once Tsuji lay in her peripheral vision, on the opposite side of the clearing from where they had placed Yamada. The Device was gone, as far as she could tell; she could cross the space with no issue. Whatever the alien construct had been brought to do, it was apparently satisfied, but she couldn't look at it. Her eyes just slid over the space every time, like it wasn't meant to be there. There was no Plot Hole for her to blame it on, and the Device was gone—she just couldn't look at it.

Her mind kept mirroring the motion. Sliding over the encounter over and over, that yawning space still there. A thought, half-formed, and that feeling of standing on the edge of something important taken away too soon.

Raiku flipped her hand positions again, trying to focus on that instead.

Without a built-in entertainment, Daisukenojo and Ryuu had settled for playing Mercy. This was made more interesting by the fact that Daisukenojo was stronger than Ryuu and seemed convinced that an arm-cast would add to rather than detract from his position, which should have helped in in a game of Mercy, but Ryuu had none and that somewhat levelled the playing field.

'Daisuke,' Raiku drawled, suspending a cage of lightning between her hands and listening to the comforting buzzing, crackling noise. 'Pretty sure he'll kill you if you don't give in.'

Shinobi Mercy was more complicated than its civilian counterpart. Ryuu had somehow managed to twist the two of them until he was effectively strangling Daisuke with his own arm. The redhead was starting to turn blue.

'Never!' he rasped.

With all this going on, it was no wonder she almost missed Yamada waking up. She caught on around the time he started coughing, and Ryuu and Daisuke sprung apart as though he'd already yelled at them for squabbling.

'Yamada!' she exclaimed, dropping the cage and crawling over to him. 'You're awake!'

'That took forever,' Daisukenojo complained, leaning over her to look down at their teacher. 'You took your time.'

Ryuu was actually doing something productive and had made his way over to check Yamada's pulse. Reminding Raiku and probably, based on his shudder, Daisukenojo, that Ryuu was responsible for their health on missions.

"You have ten seconds to tell me what the hell happened, get me?!" Yamada rasped, before breaking into a cough. He grimaced, thumping his chest. "And someone better tell me why I feel like I've been eating broken glass."

Daisukenojo yanked Raiku's hand back down before she could finish raising it guiltily. 'We all got dragged off into separate parts of the forest, and you were the most banged up,' he said, glaring at Raiku. 'We got—' he leaned closer to Yamada and squinted. 'Is he…' He waved his hand in front of Yamada's eyes. 'Uh, can you… Yamada?'

Yamada turned his head to look at the convincingly barbecued corpse. He grunted.

'Yama-ada,' Daisukenojo drew out, flashing a concerned look to Ryuu. Ryuu crouched at Yamada's side and snapped his fingers before his eyes, a movement that would usually have gotten his wrist snapped.

"What do you think you're doing?" Yamada blinked, eyes going slightly out of focus.

Ryuu drew his hand from side to side over Yamada's face, blocking the sunlight for one eye and then the other. He huffed. 'He's still a little high on whatever they gave him.'

Daisukenojo blanched. 'You can't be serious! We can't  _carry_  him, how the hell are we supposed to get him home?!'

'I think he should be able to stand,' Ryuu said, rolling his eyes. 'If we can get him moving, I can keep him upright long enough for him to sober up.'

"I can move myself, brats," Yamada said with a particularly unconvincing cross-eyed expression. "Get me?!"

He suddenly looked green. The three of them jumped back as a single unit, but after a moment, the warning signs for nausea seemed to subside and they cautiously drew back towards him.

'Do we. Do we just help him up?' Raiku asked Ryuu. 'He seems heavy.'

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here, Speedy," Yamada instructed Daisukenojo, briefly confusing both her and probably the Genematrix itself, which couldn't have been used to incorrect things being said with such incredible authority. He sat up and leaned forward, wobbling a little. "I want answers!"

'Easy,' Daisuke said, holding his hands up like he was corralling a wild animal. 'Not too fast now.'

'Are you seriously going to try and catch him if he passes out?' Raiku whispered.

'Fuck no,' he replied equally softly. 'I'm gonna let him fall on his face.'

Yamada glared, bracing his hands on his knees in preparation to stand.

'We need to get you to a hospital, Yamada,' Ryuu said, not even pretending he'd try and catch Yamada. He folded his arms across his chest, just to drive the point home. 'We can fill you in when you're not high as a kite and at risk of internal bleeding.  _More_ , that is,' he added spitefully.

Yamada was letting out a sort of long, continuous growl. It sounded a little like a rock tumbler, or a baby avalanche.

Ryuu set his feet further apart. 'You really want to argue right now, when we could be getting you medical attention?' he demanded.

Yamada began the slow, seemingly agonising process of getting to his feet. "You are gonna tell me, Sullen, get me?!" He was grimacing by the time he was fully standing, and sweating a little. "You get this goddamn stay of execution."

Ryuu shrugged. 'We'll tell you as soon as you sober up. In the meantime, it's not safe to be out here in the open with you like this.'

Good logic, but Daisuke's grin was worrying, she decided. He was enjoying Yamada's disadvantaged state too much. She'd have to keep an eye on that.

But maybe after Yamada fully regained his balance, because  _no no no no_ —Raiku yelped and ducked out of the way as Yamada crashed down like a felled tree.

_THUD._

She winced, covering her face with her hands, not daring to look. 'Is he okay?' she asked, voice muffled by her palms.

'Goddamnit,' Ryuu muttered. 'He's passed out again.'

Daisukenojo groaned. 'Oh come on!' He kicked at the ground, putting his hands on his hips. 'How the hell are we supposed to roll him over?!'

Raiku peered out from between her fingers. 'Can he breathe?' she squeaked.

The boys looked down at their prone teacher.

'Well, fuck.'

 

 

 

 

 

Six hours, a soldier pill and four repeats of Yamada's same waking questions later, they were finally up and moving.

Slowly.

She and Ryuu had raced this distance, Raiku thought wistfully. And sure, Yamada and Daisukenojo had somehow beaten them, but it had been so fast.

Unlike this _endless march of the damned._

Letting her head fall back as she trudged on, she whined. Hours.  _Hours_. And  _so many more_  to go. Of just. Walking. Shinobi didn't  _walk_. Walking was for  _civilians._  All she was left with was her thoughts, and gods knew that wasn't good.

Don't even think about it, she told her tear ducts. Don't even. Back to the walking.

And walking at night!  _Ambush_  time! Not that she could see a Plot indicating that, feel any unusual conductor activity or had any reason to expect an attack. But strategically, night-time was ambush time!

'Shut up!' Daisukenojo said for the thousandth time, from where he was keeping Yamada on-course behind her. 'I'm not telling you again!' he added threateningly, for the nine-hundredth-and-ninety-ninth.

She tugged her hair irritably, jogging a few steps to catch up with Ryuu. His threats were both terrifying and distracting. That could work.

From what she could see of his expression, he was in prime Death Threat territory anyway. 'What do you want?'

'Why do I have to want something?' she asked defensively, shoving her hands in her pockets and ignoring the fact that she did, actually, want something. 'Can't I just come up here to keep you company?'

'Raiku,' he said, looking skyward like he believed in a divine being to grant him patience, 'my tolerance for bullshit from you is relatively high right now and you're wasting it.'

'…Point taken,' she conceded. 'So. How are you doing?'

'I'm going to pretend you never asked me that. Ever, in our entire time together.'

Raiku chewed on her lip, taking care not to get her mask between her teeth in the process. 'Right then. Can I… ask a better question?'

She didn't have to look to feel Ryuu's wary glare.

Okay, diving right in then. 'I thought you and the others were going to kill each other,' she said, pointedly looking anywhere but at Ryuu. 'I was just wondering what changed? You were all so different by the time we left. I missed most of it.'

Ryuu considered her question for a moment and they walked in silence. 'You ran off,' he said eventually. 'You were gone so fast and suddenly there was this lightning strike from the forest, and it's not like we could stand around arguing when something was still clearly going on.'

Raiku blinked. 'I guess not,' she conceded.

He shrugged. 'It was easier not to kill each other when they weren't trying to kill Yamada as well.'

Raiku squinted. 'Wait. It was really that easy?'

'I wouldn't say it was "easy",' he said darkly. 'You were lucky to miss most of it. Murder aside, they were surprisingly reasonable, but they're still fucking assholes who are holding me hostage for continued interaction. They were terrified and wanted Yamada out of there as soon as possible, which makes sense.'

Hardly as bad as it could have been. They were surprisingly reasonable… in the absence of a Plot forcing Drama where it wasn't necessary, she supplemented mentally.

Wait.

'Did you just say "murder aside"…?' she asked, caught on the hypocrisy.

Ryuu ignored this highly pertinent question and snorted. 'You shouldn't be surprised. You always end up right in the middle of everything, making a goddamn mess. It's no wonder you sent the whole thing sideways.'

Raiku slowed, registering Ryuu pulling ahead of her. 'No wonder,' she echoed. Ryuu had used a softer tone, more like Byakko, more like he wasn't trying to hurt her feelings, but that wasn't what had struck her. It wasn't what had struck her just the wrong way, like a half-felt natural frequency, shaking through her mind.

'Always?' she asked, louder, too loudly, over the rising flood of her own vertigo. Ryuu looked to his left and then half-turned, raising his eyebrows to find her falling back.

'Yeah,' he confirmed, giving her a wary look. 'Always. You're not going to stay here and find another psychopath to barbecue, are you?'

'Why find another when we've got a perfectly good one to barbecue here?' Daisukenojo grumbled, passing Raiku and shoulder-checking Ryuu on his way past.

"Enough," Yamada said with a groan, rubbing the sides of his head. "First stop is the goddamn hospital, get me?"

Daisukenojo spun and started walking backwards, grinning. 'O- _ho_! Now who's lagging behind, old man?!'

Yamada glared, squaring his shoulders and marching faster towards Daisukenojo and Ryuu, only slightly wobbly on his feet. "You little  _bastard_ —"

Raiku had come to a complete stop, watching them go. Watching Daisukenojo break into a sprint, Ryuu snicker, watching them walk ahead without her.

'Always,' she repeated, and

' _we know what we are,' Tsuji told her_

and,

' _we know what we are.' Tsuji, bleeding-begging-breaking, 'we know,' and_

she did.


	69. they bend things, change shapes

Raiku walked on.

She could feel the enormous, black-saturated mass that laced Konoha getting closer with every step she took through the forest. The Gairano generally had mixed feelings about coming home, and she'd always thought that she understood why. She thought that the mix of relief to be with those who understood you could only be matched by that sliding feeling of wrongness, of that building nausea and weight; could only be met by that perfect counterbalance.

Now she had to wonder whether the way she felt was shared by any of them at all.

Raiku walked on and the voices of her teammates sounded heavy and wrong, distorted and muffled around her.

It was funny, the way a single thought could shape the world around a person. It was almost physical.

Maybe it was.

Maybe the rules weren't the same for her.

There was a high buzz in her ears, like the noise that rang after an explosion. It was faint and piercing, and Raiku could hear it and her heart and almost nothing else. Her limbs were numb at the edges, replaced with thrumming electricity. She'd been walking through it for miles and her legs should have hurt, because Raiku wasn't built for stamina.

She wasn't built for many things, really.

Raiku walked and she walked and she  _walked_  until she found herself on familiar ground, until a hand brushed over her shoulder and the faces of her teammates moved in and out of the world in front of her, voices low and muffled still. Buildings that she knew, gates large and imposing and exactly the same as they always were. She pushed her way through hands and voices that had never felt so insubstantial and through paved streets, through black Plot that dragged and stretched across the earth in front of her and twisted and bent in her wake, rippling against and then through the circle around her.

And she walked on. Raiku walked up the slope that she had fled and jumped down a thousand times, letting her feet take her there without thinking. She walked up the gravelled plane and through the compound gateway, walked through people and their muffled voices like a ghost. There was a sting, a removed sort of ache as she went in through the doors. Familiarity struck her low in the chest, but not hard enough to startle her. Not hard enough to really hurt.

And so she made her way along the path until she came to her front door and through it, taking off her shoes in the entry and moving to where she knew, somehow, he'd be.

He stood at the kitchen counter facing the door, head bent over an open scroll. He was there. He was there, and she'd known he would be, and the high, painful noise grew to fever pitch.

Her father looked up, a smile already forming on his face. When he saw her, it faded and died.

The static in her ears abruptly cut off, just leaving the silence.

'Dad,' Raiku said.

Her father looked at her, eyes dark and watchful. 'Raiku,' he said.

They stood and looked at each other silently for a long moment.

Raiku felt the world still bending and curving around her, making space for her in its great and terrible way. There was something too quiet, too deep to be a coherent thought and it was seeping through the silence that she'd found herself in, it was starting to take shape through the perfect, invisible bubble around her.

In front of her, her father raised his hand. 'It's going to be okay,' he said quietly, eyes wide. 'Walk towards me. Slowly.'

Raiku felt herself mechanically tilt her head to the side and she watched his figure swim in her vision; she realised she hadn't blinked since she saw him. Her eyes were burning, starting to water, but she couldn't take her eyes off him.

Her father took a cautious step forward and she felt it, she  _felt_  it resonate, like there were ripples coming from the impact, through the floor towards her. There was a haze shimmering around him, burning and alien and  _infringing_  on her, invading her space until she was breathing it in and suffocating—

Her father stopped, eyes sharply coming in to focus on her face. ' _Raiku_ ,' he said again, in a tone of revelation, and Raiku opened her mouth and screamed as her father lunged towards her. She screamed and electricity poured out of her mouth and from behind her eyes, surged from her skin where it had been held in by her ribs, turning everything to violence and brightness and  _noise_. The world rippled and shook around her and she could feel it, suddenly, that great, invisible wall around her, pressing and then shooting towards her. The walls not closing in but collapsing, shoved inwards to shove her

_down_

into the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

' _It's alright,' Tsuji sighed, eyes black and knowing and ageless, watching_

_watching_

_seeing, and he told her_

'It's alright.'

There was a hand pressed to her shoulder, grounding her to the floor. The acrid smell of smoke, overpowering and unmistakable.

When she opened her eyes, her father looked down at her wearily. 'It's alright,' he said patiently, like he'd been saying it for some time.

Raiku stared at him for a moment, and then shoved him harshly away, scrambling awkwardly to the opposing corner. Her fingers sunk into the burnt, splintering wood to get her away faster and they immediately started to sting and throb. In a way, it was a relief to have something as familiar as pain.

'Easy!' her father said, hands splayed in front of him. 'It's okay, Raiku!' He was burnt but not nearly as much as he should have been, based on the blackened, devastated scene that was their ground floor.

 _Jounin_ , she remembered,

 _Gairano_ , something echoed.

It was all she could do not to laugh hysterically, but the words turned into a shout. 'It's not okay!' Raiku cried. 'How can you say it's okay?!'

'So you know,' he said instead of answering.

' _You_  knew!' Raiku balled her hands into fists, another wave of electricity surging out before she could help herself, before she could drag it back to just crackling along her skin. The air hummed threateningly, but her father didn't seem phased.

Of course not. He'd seen this all along.  _All along_.

'You knew and you didn't tell me!'

'Raiku, you were caught in a Device,' he said loudly, 'you need to take a breath, you need to  _stop_  for a moment and—'

'I  _am a Device,_  what  _difference_ does it make!' she shouted.

The words hung between them like a physical barrier. She'd said it. It was real then, the way an unspoken thing just wasn't.

He watched her, breathing heavily. He didn't say she was wrong. He didn't say anything.

'I am a Device!' she repeated, voice cracking.

He took a few deep breaths, looking at her unblinkingly. 'There was a secondary Device attached to you, Raiku,' he said firmly. 'Latched on to magnify itself. Try to think of how you got here, everyone you spoke to.'

Raiku could have slapped him. She could have sunk her teeth into him and bitten down to feel skin rip and she could have  _torn him to pieces_. 'Try focusing on this Device!' she spat, gesturing sharply at herself.

Annoyance flashed over his face— _annoyance_ , like he had the right to be frustrated. 'I can't help you if I don't know what's happening,' he started evenly, and Raiku slashed her hand through the air to cut him off.

'Just  _listen_ to me,  _I_  am what's happening!' She sounded like she was pleading and she hated it, she didn't want to  _beg,_  she wanted to  _take_ , she wanted to pull the information out of him.

'Raiku, I am not having this conversation with you and every Device in Konoha!' he snapped, composure starting to crack around the edges. 'I am trying my best!'

'How could you not  _tell_  me?!' The circle, that space around her feet was gone. It was another Device and it had felt natural, it had felt  _fine_  when every part of her should have been screaming against it. Worse yet, its absence left her feeling naked, like the twisted solidarity had been a form of support instead of the parasitic, world-bending force she knew objectively it was.

That she knew objectively  _she_ was. The thought came to her like a hot spike in the back of her mind, another surge of self-loathing that erupted out of her in accusations. 'Who else knew?!' she demanded. 'Did Mura know?! How many people have you taken care of just because they knew about me, when you're supposed to protect us! All of us! Not just me! You're our  _leader!'_

'I am your  _father!_ ' he shouted back, a sudden escalation that startled her into taking a step back. He seemed bigger, suddenly, bare of the pretensions that he adopted to make himself seem smaller, to seem milder, to seem less… aware. 'Before I am a Gairano, before I am a shinobi, I am your father! There is  _nothing_  I would not do for you!'

Raiku flinched, struggling not to back away further in the face of her usually measured father's rage. She'd known that her father's anger could suck all the air out of a room, but never had she felt it so physically before.

Had she just not realised? Had she been so oblivious to that great, aching force, pressing against some invisible barrier of her own? It had always been comforting, that great wall around her father; it had always been reassuring to know his reach was so great that she and the others could be shielded under it. Before. But then, she had always assumed it included her.

'How?!' her voice was cracking. She hated herself for it, but it cracked anyway. 'How can you say that when I'm, I'm  _part_  of it and it's hurt us all so  _much—'_

'Stop!' he snapped, crossing the space between them quickly, too quickly for her and grabbing her by the shoulders. 'Don't! Don't you dare! Listen to me very carefully.' He looked into her eyes. Really looked, not through her or at some distant point, and Raiku suddenly felt like a child again, too uncertain and small to meet his gaze. 'I know the Genematrix better than anyone. I know what it does. And you are the only good thing to ever come out of it, do you understand?' He shook her. 'Listen to me, I had to decide!'

Raiku shook her head, pulling away weakly, but both of them knew her heart wasn't in it and his grip just tightened.

'I had to decide,' he pressed on relentlessly, 'whether or not every cruel, senseless thing the Genematrix did, whether watching all those people die again and seeing it all play out, every day of my entire life—whether I could accept it was worth it for you, and I chose yes; I chose you!'

Raiku hung her head but he shook her again, clearly not willing to take her avoidance for an answer.

'I will  _always_  choose you, and don't try and tell yourself that I don't understand what I'm saying, that I don't understand the consequences,' he snapped, 'because I don't care  _where_  the universe pulled you out from, there's not a person on earth who understands better than I do, I was  _born_  understanding that!'

'Then why didn't you know before?!' she cried, fisting her hands in her hair. 'Why didn't you say anything?!'

He exhaled roughly, almost strongly enough for it to be a curse. 'I had no idea what would happen, what the rules are! Whether knowing would be enough to, to snap you out of it, like being a person was something you could wake up from!'

'But I'm not a person!'  _Don't you dare cry, Raiku_ , she thought savagely, feeling the burn;  _don't you dare._

Her father tensed, going still. Raiku found herself stopping as well, breath caught on an inhale.

'Don't you ever,' he said slowly, ' _ever_ … say that again, don't you—' his hands tightened on her shoulders again, convulsively. 'You,' he ground out, 'are  _Gairano Raiku_ , you are my daughter and you are a person no matter where you came from.'

Raiku started shaking her head again, every fibre of her being protesting. 'No, no, this can't have happened, I'm not even meant to be possible, how is this possible?!' His face, when she looked up, was ashen. Stricken, but that hard look was still in his eyes. Like she'd flayed him open and just found steel when she'd expected flesh. 'How could you not have known?' she asked, and he pressed his lips together so hard that they went white as she closed her eyes just for a moment, unable to look at him.

'The fail-field keeps things out, Raiku, I didn't think it would trap you  _in_.'

Her eyes shot open. 'Is that what happened?!' she demanded, looking up at him. 'Am I just a Device that got… stuck in here?!' She paled, hands suddenly coming to fist in her shirt. Bloody fingers starting to claw at herself. 'Is the real Gairano trapped in here!?' she asked, perilously close to another scream. 'Are they just, just stuck in here while I walk around, while I—'

'No no no, Raiku, no, breathe!'

She was getting lightheaded, and her knees suddenly felt less sure of themselves than they had moments before. 'I can't be in here,' she gasped, somehow too short of air. 'I need to, I need fresh air, I have to—' she jerked out of his grip and stumbled towards the door. He let her go and she staggered out to their blackened porch, shoving aside their crumbling door on her way and then sitting heavily down on the top step, gripping her chest still and taking great, gulping gasps of air that burnt all the way down.

The air outside was cold and still smelt strongly of smoke, of the smouldering embers left of the bottom floor, but it was better than being inside. It was better than being suffocated by the enclosed space, of feeling like she was too big for the walls.

He was learning. Or he had to have been, over the years, because her dad let her sit and gasp, and clutch at herself until her breathing started to slow, until her limbs weren't so hot that she couldn't feel how they were shaking, until she started to draw back in inside her skin like she belonged there. He must have learnt something after all because it was only after all that that she heard his quiet footsteps pass the doorway, saw him step down next to her and sit. He was close enough to reach out and touch, if she wanted to, but not so close she could do it before then.

Then, to her profound shock, he pulled out a cigarette and lighter.

Her dad had quit smoking years and years ago, she remembered. Her mother had told him that he had to before they got married or she'd call the whole thing off. And he had, but Raiku had caught him at it maybe once, twice before, when things were truly bad. When the Plots were darker than usual, when they were more silence than screams. He'd smelt like smoke just one day that she could recall, hard and distinct in her memory. He'd sat in the dark on their porch, staring at nothing through the smoke in the air and Sasuke hadn't been at school the day after.

No Uchiha had been.

He lit a cigarette now, the tip of it glowing bright in the darkness as he inhaled. 'I'm sorry,' he said after a long exhale. 'I should have told you and I'm so sorry, Raiku.'

Sorry.

Raiku nodded, letting that sink in. Sorry. And he meant it, she could hear it—he was sorry, and she should still have been angry, but her shoulders slumped. The anger had drained out and left her feeling empty and deflated; quietened, on the inside. He  _was_  sorry.

Raiku made mistakes. She made them all the time. People did.

She had to be fair. She had to be fair because she loved him and he was her dad, and people made mistakes.

People got angry, too, she knew. People got angry and held grudges, but it was hard. It was an exhausting thought, and maybe she wasn't a person all the way through, because she could kill a thing without ever hating them, and she didn't want to hate her dad.

'Just… what can you tell me?' she asked quietly. 'I barely… I'm this  _thing_  and I don't even know what it means.'

He rubbed his jaw with his free hand, looking briefly down at the ground. 'I'll tell you everything I know, but the reality is that we  _don't_  know that much about them,' he said, smoke streaming out between his lips. 'They're hard

 _to see_ ,' she heard Tsuji's voice slide over her father's, a temporary flanging as his words echoed in her mind.

 _They bend things_.  _Change shapes_.

She shook her head and her father came back into focus. 'We know they tend to correspond with Narrative elements, like tragedy, or love,' he said, and his lips quirked but he didn't seem amused. 'We can read their path along certain thematic lines, but where multiple Devices exist along the same theme, we can't see them well enough to differentiate until after the fact.'

'That's why we keep them in broad categories,' she murmured. Tragedy. Romance. Revelation. Melodrama.

He nodded, taking another long drag off his cigarette, taking a moment to tap some ash out on the ground. 'Some are more obvious, and we can narrow it down. We had a pretty good fix on Amnesia for a while, but it's been a few years since that was highly active.'

She knew. She knew.

But she asked. 'What category am I?'

'There's only one of you,' he said instead of answering plainly. The words by themselves could have been another reassurance, but he just said it like a fact. As an answer rather than a placation. He stared out into nothing. 'So there's no category, there's just you.'

'But what am I?' she asked again.

She needed him to say it.

He had to  _say it_.

He didn't look at her. He didn't speak for a long time.

'I think you know,' he said finally. 'I think after whatever or whoever made you realise this, you already know.'

'What am I?' she asked again, wanting somehow for him to look at her and also for him not to, to not see his eyes as he said it.

'You're Destruction,' he said at last.

She had expected it to hurt, she realised only when it didn't. She had expected the words to hurt in some way, to be a sort of mental stripping back of a protective layer, like it had been with Tsuji. But in the dark, in her father's voice, it just quietly resonated somewhere deep down. Like a small thing falling from a ledge it had teetered on, finally succumbing to gravity.

He continued after a moment, after another inhalation of the acrid smoke. 'You've always been here. We've called you many things.'

'Catastrophe,' she said quietly, because she knew this one. She'd read about it, had seen it written across the history of Konoha. 'Disaster,  _calamity—_ '

'A sudden and violent change of circumstances, status or narrative equilibrium, physical or otherwise,' he corrected, with the air of a man reciting a familiar script. He shook his head, tapping ash onto their ruined porch step. 'We should have known. I should have known. It was one of the only Devices that was just… always here. Of course it was the one your mother got too close to. Of course it was.'

Raiku could feel her body getting heavy with fatigue, was becoming more and more conscious of the throbbing pain in her fingertips. Every second that passed made her more aware of her own physicality, that grounded space that she'd felt so removed from until she crossed the compound boundary. Until she'd set foot back home, and reality had started seeping back in and broken through that perfect circle.

'And things always escalated that way when you were nearby, like you just couldn't escape from it,' he continued. 'It had never been so hard for one of us to stay out of things before, but it was actively trying to find you. Obvious, in retrospect.'

Obvious. Yeah, she thought. Obvious, right.

'… Is it my fault?' she asked. 'All of it? The demon attacking, my mother dying, Sasuke—'

'No,' he denied, without the knee-jerk vehemence that would have made it easy to doubt him. 'It's not the sea's fault people drown. There's no fault there, not for you.'

'Not for me, but… someone.'

He snorted lightly through his nose, expression tainted with bitterness. 'Oh, yes.'

The Genematrix hung between them, before them, everywhere around them, like a curse.

'Has this happened before?' she asked, and her voice cracked. 'Did you know there were others like me and say nothing?'

Her dad flinched like she'd struck him.

'There was one, that I know of,' he said eventually. 'But I didn't know until they were already gone.' She heard a click as he swallowed. 'They're still not like you, Raiku. You could never be like that.'

'Like what?'

'There are some things worse than destruction,' he told her with distant eyes, looking at something faded into the past. 'There are worse things to have than an end.'

Raiku's bloodied fingers curled in the long end of her sleeves, just to have something to hold on to.

After a long, long silence, her father lifted his arm, opening his side to her. She looked at him askance but he kept looking forward, the cigarette burning down to a stub between the fingers of his other hand.

Raiku hesitated for a bare second, then shuffled over and leaned heavily into his side with a heavy sigh. He felt cool through the fabric, like most people did, but the space between them wasn't pushing her out anymore.

Maybe it had been anger, she reflected; anger, rather than the fail-field, which had never rejected her before. He hadn't rejected her even once he'd known. It would have made no sense for the fail-field to expel her now.

 _A change of circumstances_ , the thought drifted across her mind; the sort of thing that could change a Gairano but had never bothered before. But no. Not her father. Not Gairano Chitose, whom Plot fled from.

He sighed. 'It was almost a relief, eventually,' he said. 'Finding out that you weren't disposable like the rest of us, that you mattered more than just to me.'

Raiku hummed, but was too tired to make it a truly curious sound.

'I learnt so early,' he murmured, 'that what you want doesn't matter when someone has the power to take it away, but you were—I couldn't…'

She felt him sigh heavily again where she was leaning against him, sheltered under the arm around her shoulders. She could smell smoke and ink, the mix of smells that made up her father and coloured her childhood.

'I love you,' he said simply. 'So much.'

Raiku swallowed, testing for a moment. But it wasn't hard to say; she didn't have to force it out like she'd feared. 'I love you too, dad,' she replied.

He nodded, and she felt a shudder pass through him, just once. It was familiar to her enough by that point that she felt it resonate and could only hope it was from relief. He nodded again, clearing his throat.

'Honestly,' he said, injecting some cheer into his voice, but not enough to make it less rough, 'with you right there, it explained a lot about the Uchiha.'

Raiku paused. 'What?' she asked, certain she'd misheard him.

He coughed and raised his voice. 'It's okay!' he called. 'We're fine, you can come out!'

Confused, she quickly looked out over their singed yard. Curious faces peered out at her from around the various houses, her cousin Senta already carrying wooden planks towards them, braced over a broad shoulder. His mother was holding a toolkit, and the emerging construction tools of the Gairano were starting to congregate in front of their damaged house.

'Oh Raiku!' her cousin Izai said cheerfully, already coming up the stairs with a tape measure in one hand and a pencil tucked behind her ear. 'Welcome home, I thought I saw you coming in.' Chatter started rising amongst her family as assessing gazes were cast over their home, tools being organised into various piles in their front yard.

Raiku found a wobbly smile coming across her face just moments before someone swiftly smacked her in the side of the head.

'You idiot!' Mayuko scolded, already lifting Raiku's hands to look at the blood on her fingers. 'What were you thinking, coming straight home instead of going to hospital?' She was in scrubs and slightly out of breath and Raiku felt the strangest surge of affection rising up in her at the sight of her familiar, harassed-looking relative.

'I just wanted to come home,' Raiku said, and realised for the first time it was true.

Mayuko looked inches from smacking her again before, to both of their profound shock, Raiku lunged forward from her sitting position and hugged her awkwardly around her waist. After a moment of tension, Raiku felt Mayuko slowly relax. 'Teenagers,' she heard her mutter. 'So emotional.' But her hand settled on Raiku's head anyway.

There was a moment of serenity before Mayuko spoke again from overhead.

'Chitose,' she said icily, 'have you been  _smoking_?'

And Raiku could finally laugh, just a weak and quiet thing, as she heard her father hastily scramble to escape.


	70. Daisukenojo Prime

Mayuko hadn't been pleased to have to put them up in her family's home, but that could just have been her general attitude coming through. Raiku knew she loved them, really. She'd stuffed them into the guest bedrooms with lists of things not to do that, insultingly, included items like "don't touch anything".

It was even worse that Raiku could see how they were pretty justified.

Their cousin's family had long showed her father the same kind of wary friendliness that Raiku had seen before, when he'd been assessing previous candidates to replace him; it wasn't exactly a sought-after role by the candidates' families. Mayu's first cousin Senta was being considered, and she had been especially terse with them ever since she found out. Her dad was still their uncle, their cousin, a Gairano, but no one was eager to offer their kid up for that kind of responsibility. General Plot aversion saved them most of the time but it did seem to make the line of succession pretty hard to sort out, since nominating someone to then immerse themselves in Plot machinations became sort of like trying to catch goldfish with a teaspoon. That previous potential candidates had generally met unfortunate fates didn't help; they'd been shinobi, from memory, and it wasn't like Gairano shinobi had a better life expectancy than the rest of them.

On the bright side, no one woke as early as Raiku and her father, so despite being in someone else's home, at least she had the comforting ritual of eating breakfast across the table from him when it was just the two of them. Well. She ate while he read a book, since apparently taking his own food to the same table as her was "unwise" and "just counterproductive".

She'd been worried, coming down the stairs, that it would be awkward. Luckily, the silence between them felt the same as usual.

'You have a letter waiting,' her father said absently.

Raiku hummed in acknowledgement.

'Uzumaki dropped it off. It's from Gaara.'

Raiku took a sip of tea, making the same sound again.

Her father tilted his book down enough to peer at her over it. He raised his eyebrows.

Raiku picked up her toast and resumed munching.

After a few seconds, crumbs went flying across the room when Raiku spat them out. 'What?!' she howled.

Her father lowered the book again, apparently having had the sense to raise it like a shield. 'I was afraid of this,' he said, not seeming particularly afraid at all. 'There were big things happening with that boy, and it had you written all over it.'

Raiku gawked at him. 'He lives in Sand! He's, he's the  _opposite_  of me!'

Chitose shot her a dry look. 'Not your name, Raiku. You. Remember, you saw Sakura and Naruto the day before you left for Iji? You would have seen the Plot then.'

Oh.

Her mouth twisted.

Her father had already filled her in on the latest Plot development. Gaara's abduction. Naruto's triumphant return. She'd been lucky enough to be out of town for those milestones but the idea that her brief contact with them was enough to even slightly contribute to that enormous disaster was…

This was going to take some getting used to.

'Seeking you out wouldn't be unusual for Gaara,' her dad said dryly, brushing crumbs from the cover of his book. 'Boy was a destruction magnet. If that wasn't a common shinobi affliction in Konoha, you probably would have been as good as stapled to him. Carried around like the gourd.'

Despite the incredibly unamusing mental picture this was, his lips twitched.

'So what do I do?' she asked, spitefully stuffing a whole piece of toast in her mouth as an edible, carbohydrate-filled proxy for her irritation. 'Do I write him back? Do I even read it?'

He let out a long breath, considering it. 'Well,' he said slowly, 'the Genematrix is going to find a way to get your particular Narrative potential no matter what you do, so my advice would be to go about business as usual and ignore any sudden, uncharacteristic urges to deviate. Based on my observations, it'll just use a proxy Character to get near enough to you to springboard the Plot to where it needs to go, assuming you don't play ball, and it will then affect whatever it needs to. It won't want to be too near you with the fail-field in effect, not at this critical stage. It'll work around you as best as it can. Like Gaara getting in touch with you now, of all times; he's just had a major life event that you were a factor in. He probably just automatically thought of you when it was over and didn't realise why.'

She paused. 'What, like I'm a… a stop on the Plot's itinerary?' she asked.

He nodded. Or shrugged. It was a weird combination of both but either way, he didn't seem nearly as bothered as he should have.

'Wait, wait, wait.' Raiku waved a hand. 'So I  _shouldn't_  avoid Characters?' Sure, she'd spent a lifetime learning the opposite, but why not change that all up now?

Chitose winced. 'No, that's too broad. Go about your business and if they happen to show up, don't be surprised. If you feel the sudden urge to find one of them, then you should steer clear.' He slid a small folded piece of paper across the table, a Suna stamp painfully obvious on the corner.

Raiku picked it up gingerly with two fingers, sliding it into a pocket. She was making a face. She could feel herself making a face. 'Yeah. That's not ambiguous.'

He flicked his fingers. 'I know it's not helpful,' he admitted. 'But we're going to have to learn as we go with this one.' He took a sip of tea and opened the book again. 'Hatori's here, by the way. Got a plan to explain the fugue?'

"Fugue." An innocuous way of saying "that state of shock you entered while a Device latched on to you and dragged you home," she supposed. As good a euphemism as any, but she hadn't been up half the night trying to think of the best way to make this all blow over for nothing. She nodded and stood, draining the last dregs of her own tea before yanking her mask back up. She gave him a quick, one-armed hug on the way past before padding towards the door, someone knocking on it just as she was walking up. 'It's open!' she called, settling down on the step to pull her shoes out of the cubby.

The door swung open, revealing her shortest teammate. Daisukenojo nodded. 'Hey. 'Sup.'

Raiku nodded back, tugging on her shoes. 'Hey Daisuke. You sleep alright?' Don't ask, she pleaded silently; don't ask yet about her weird behaviour when she got back to Konoha. Surely she'd have a short grace period?

Daisukenojo shrugged. 'Fine.'

Raiku nodded again, this time to herself, and fought the urge to fist pump. She stood and dusted off her hands, gesturing. 'Shall we go? To the hospital, right, to see Yamada?'

Daisukenojo turned to let her walk past him and closed the door behind her, then fell into step beside her. 'So why'd you come and get me?' she asked. 'Actually, how did you know where I was? My house had. Um.'

Uh.

'A small fire,' she said slowly, in a way that was not at all suspicious.

'Your cousin stopped me on the way in,' Daisukenojo said, jerking a thumb in some random direction. 'Told me where you were.'

'Oh cool. Cool cool. Coo-ool,' she drew out, tapping her fingers on her thighs as they walked. Unlike with her father, the silence they fell into wasn't easy. It felt strangely strained, and she couldn't help but try to increase the distance between them in expectation of a famous Daisukenojo Temper Attack. Was he just waiting for her to crack and explain herself?

Oh god, had she done anything weird? Had she said something, had she blurted out the wrong thing?!

Oblivious to her spiralling, Daisukenojo skidded awkwardly down the slope leading to the compound gates, even rustier at it than before; apparently Raiku's social lethargy had left her friends unused to getting to and from her house. She restrained a proud smile and jumped down after him, only to try and scramble back up backwards when a red blur smashed into Daisukenojo's side.

'Daisuke!' she exclaimed, trying to catch her footing. Two Daisukenojos ignored her.

Raiku stared.

'Alright, you!' one of the Daisukenojos barked, grabbing the other by the collar and shaking him, while the other struggled with strange clumsiness. 'You've had your fun!'

She skittered down back to the road and stalked up to them, jabbing the dominant Daisukenojo in the side, then pulling at his face. 'What the hell?!'

The dominant Daisukenojo, or Daisukenojo Prime, glared at her and jerked his face out of her gloved grip. 'Oh, so  _Ryuu_  you can pick from his  _identical twin_  but not me from her?!' he hissed, lowering his voice at the mention of Ryuu's odd new secret.

Raiku gaped, looking between the two. Daisukenojo Beta huffed and suddenly burst into a plume of smoke, making Raiku cough and wave her hand in front of her face.

'Masami!' Daisukenojo accused when the smoke had cleared to reveal a lanky, red-haired younger female still dangling from his grip. She beamed at him proudly, despite his obvious irritation. 'I told you, you can't just do that whenever you want!'

'How'd you know I was over here?' the girl demanded, giving a token struggle. Now adjusted to the the shock of one-hundred-percent more Daisuke than she was used to, Raiku recognised the girl as one of Daisuke's younger sisters, still in training to be a Genin.

'Oh yeah,' Daisuke scoffed, 'like I don't have you little monsters chakra tagged, get real! And  _you!_ ' he snapped, turning on Raiku. 'Don't you think that this is gonna mean we're not talking about your crazy-ass behaviour yesterday! This—' he shook Masami, whose giggles implied that she mainly seemed to enjoy it, '—is  _not_  weird enough to make us even, this is just a tiny speed-bump!'

Raiku looked at Masami, then back at him, then back at Masami. Daisukenojo shook her again to try and stop the giggling, but there was clearly no malice in it despite his scowling. He was strong enough to have ripped the girl's head clean off if he was so inclined, so that kind of gentle wobbling wasn't fooling anyone.

'Don't tell Ma,' Masami whined.

'Oh, I'm  _so_  telling her,' Daisukenojo said, relishing every word. 'Toaster, go to the hospital,  _straight_  to the hospital. I'll meet you there.'

'What the hell is going on?!' Raiku burst out, since no answers seemed forthcoming. This was, even for a shinobi, not exactly a normal morning.

'I said go to the hospital!' Daisukenojo repeated, lifting Masami slightly higher to carry her off like a cat absconding with an errant kitten. 'Straight! There!'

Raiku remained standing there, staring after them long after he'd taken the turn that would eventually take him back to his house.

'What is my life, even?' she mumbled to herself.

* * *

In Raiku's experience, people tended to look smaller in hospital beds. Diminished, somehow.

This was not the case for Yamada, probably because they'd had to put him across two beds pushed together.

She awkwardly sidled into his hospital room feeling like an intruder, sliding the door closed behind her with exaggerated care.

Yamada's heart monitor beeped out his resting heartrate achingly slowly. She felt unfit just hearing the gap between beeps. The room was small but he didn't have to share it—perks of a Jounin, she supposed—and was restful, with cheerful sunlight filtering in through leaves outside one of the window. There was enough room for Yamada's two beds and a couple of chairs, as well as—

'He's been awake, on and off, but it took a lot out of him.'

\- Ryuu, crouching in the second windowsill like a gargoyle.

Raiku jumped back, thudding hard against the door. ' _What the hell—!_ ' She glanced at the sleeping Yamada and dropped her voice to a stage whisper. 'What the hell is wrong with you?!'

Ryuu rolled his eyes, dropping fully into the room and straightening. 'Good morning to you too, toaster.'

Raiku remained plastered to the door. 'There are  _chairs_! Why couldn't you sit in a chair, like a, a normal person!'

'Normal is for peasants,' Ryuu said, bending down to rummage through the bag he'd left propped up against a chair leg.

Raiku pushed herself from the door to enter the room more fully, shaking her head. '...Peasants?' she repeated, scratching the back of her head.

'He's been pretty out of it. Doesn't remember anything past killing the gang in the forest,' Ryuu informed her. 'We just need our story straight for the report, and we can wrap this up for good. The same thing we all agreed on before he woke up last time.'

'But he's going to be okay?' she asked, hovering uncertainly near Yamada's elbow. People were meant to look peaceful in their sleep. Yamada still looked vaguely disgruntled, like he was dreaming of someone disagreeing with him. The bags under his eyes were more pronounced, even in sleep, but his chest was rising and falling with reassuring steadiness. She wasn't sure what she'd expected. Either, she supposed, that he'd be up and keen to leave already, or that he'd be on the verge of death. The Genematrix generally didn't bother with chronic states or long recovery, so neither were frequently seen in Jounin.

She eyed him, half-scared he would expire at any moment.

'He'll be fine. He'll outlive us all. But look over here for a second.'

Raiku nodded to herself but didn't, self-consciously pulling the blanket up to cover Yamada's stomach more fully where it had drooped down a bit. She jerked back when Ryuu snapped his fingers in front of her. 'Hey. Look at me.' She looked back at him to find him holding a piece of white cardboard between his hands in front of him. His expression was worryingly deadpan. With a flick of his wrists, the cardboard between his hands had flipped over.

_INTERVENTION_

Raiku gawked.

Ryuu, face still impassive, freed one hand to gesture at the words like he was a game show host.

Raiku tilted her head, still staring helplessly. Like the sign would resolve itself into something that made sense if she saw it from the right angle.

'Fucking. Hatori,' he said, like it was more than a woefully insufficient explanation.

'Is that red ink?' she asked.

'But he's not here, so apparently it's now my goddamn intervention,' he continued, just steamrolling over her. 'So much for just "holding the sign, Ryuu, don't be an asshole about doing that one thing".' His imitation of Daisukenojo was strange, mostly because he'd captured Daisuke's cadence perfectly but hadn't changed his pitch at all. It was a little eerie. 'So here we are.'

Raiku shifted back, but knew any attempt to escape would be futile when Ryuu just tilted his head slightly.  _Go on_ , that tiny gesture invited,  _you really want to try it?_

Raiku braced herself.

'What the hell has been going on with you.' Ryuu asked bluntly. Or really, Ryuu asked (probably). He never had mastered the art of making questions sound as such. 'You've been totally insane since we fought Yamada.'

Raiku felt her eyebrows slowly start to creep up her forehead. 'What's been going on… with  _me_?' she asked.

Ryuu sent the sign spinning away carelessly, like a frisbee. 'Yeah. You.'

It was a fair question. Fairer than he knew. But the hypocrisy still rankled and she couldn't help herself.

' _I've_  been insane?! That was—we were—we got sidelined by  _you_  getting replaced by your evil twin so that your secret-bloodline-having family could try and convince you to come home before you could  _murder_  aforementioned twin—'

'Say it a little louder,' Ryuu said, 'I dare you. Just yell it right in the middle of the hospital. Maybe go right to the Hokage's office on the second floor, save us all some time.'

'I'll say it as loud as I damn well please!' Raiku said shrilly.

Ryuu nodded, putting his hands in his pockets. His shoulders were relaxed. That was never good. Ryuu only found a few things relaxing, and the suffering of others was the main one. Shortly followed by "being proven right" and "more suffering." 'Sure. And then why don't you tell her all about how you totally lost your mind, zoned out like you were under mind control all the way home and then tried to blow up your own house?'

Raiku was saved from having to respond by the door opening, which was convenient because she didn't really have a response and was mostly caught on the idea of Ryuu somehow knowing what had happened to her home. 'Sorry,' Daisukenojo said, not having bothered to knock before he came in. 'My brother's learning henge, and he went and taught the others so now they're all turning into me whenever they get the chance. It's their new favourite thing, I'm running into myself all the time. Where are we up to?'

Ryuu gestured at the small, ominously red-inked sign, now lying face-up on the floor by Yamada's bed.

'Right.' Daisuke rounded on her. 'What the  _hell_  is going on with you?!'

'Nothing! It was a hard mission!'

Daisukenojo and Ryuu exchanged a look that made her cringe. Great. Solidarity. Exactly what she needed.

'Think she'll crack?' Ryuu asked.

Daisukenojo frowned. 'She can be pretty stubborn.'

'That's pretty rich, coming from you.'

'Well I'd know, wouldn't I?'

Raiku had to do something. They were bonding over banding against her, again. They had that worrying tendency. 'Okay,' she began. They turned to her with foreboding synchronicity. 'I know I was super out of it on the way back.'

'No shit,' Daisukenojo agreed, folding his arms. 'You didn't even  _hear_  us. You were a zombie.'

'I was trying… really hard, to,' the key had to be partial truths, had to be, 'deal with it all?' Raiku swallowed. 'That guy was a civilian, and we'd been fighting Yamada, and I didn't know what we were going to do when we got back here—'

Ryuu cut her off rudely. 'She's lying.'

Daisukenojo frowned, squinting at her. 'I don't think so, man.'

Ryuu gestured at her. 'Look at her, she's thinking too hard about what she's saying. Lying.'

Daisukenojo made a face. 'She's pretty emotionally stuffed-up, though, so it could just be that.'

'You're not buying this,' Ryuu said flatly. 'You can't be.'

Raiku raised her voice over them to keep going. 'And Ryuu had been abducted and it all went really wrong on our first Chuunin mission and I didn't know how to deal with it so I just sort of shut down until I got home and then I lost it and almost burnt my own  _house_  down—'

Ryuu wasn't looking appeased but Daisukenojo was starting to look more sympathetic. That suited her fine; she just needed one of them to believe her. That was the problem with groups of three: it was always two against one, one way or another.

'But I'm going to be fine!' She spread her hands. 'It's over, and we're okay! I just need a bit of time to get through it and I'll be all good again!' She tried her best to look vulnerable. This was made easier by her incredible discomfort, fortunately.

Daisukenojo scratched the side of his neck, taking her in. He hummed thoughtfully, clearly testing this against his own observations, AKA the only emotional intelligence present in the group. Raiku looked down at the floor quickly, feeling Ryuu's glare boring into her face. 'You haven't done anything like that before,' Daisuke said, tone neutral.

She nodded, keeping her eyes down. 'I know.'

'You know we're gonna be worried when you go off the rails like that.'

She nodded again.

'But you've been talking to your dad? You're working it out?'

Another nod.

Daisukenojo huffed. 'If she's dealing, I say we let it slide.'

Ryuu exploded. 'What?!'

'Well, she's fucking traumatised! Because of that whole thing with  _your_  family! Everyone gets a freakout now and again, we're goddamn professional murderers!'

'This was  _your_  idea!'

Raiku snuck a look at the two of them. Ryuu seemed mostly outraged by this point, which fit the idea of Daisukenojo bullying him into having an emotional conversation and then making him be the one to advocate continuing it. Ryuu would never appreciate being left stranded in any sort of emotional dialogue, let alone one with her.

'Hey, I just wanted to make sure she was okay and not just bottling it all up again, since we all know what happens when she gets feelings!' Raiku wondered briefly if Daisukenojo was talking about the lightning, which he'd dealt with pretty gracefully in the past, or the crying. Based on his brief hunted look, she'd have to say the crying. Any shinobi worth their salt would rather deal with lightning strong enough to liquefy them than a single emotional outburst, herself included.

God, the crying.

'No, no way,' Ryuu denied. 'She can't get away with this, she's barely even  _trying_!'

Well, that wasn't fair. She'd spent ages thinking of the right words to use! This was a very carefully constructed not-quite-a-lie.

'What?' Daisuke asked slyly, in that way he had to know infuriated Ryuu beyond measure, 'you keen to be a shoulder for her to cry on? We all have a giant feeling-fest?'

Raiku froze like she'd been the one to mention the forbidden Ryuu Feelings.

Ryuu slowly, slowly tilted his head to the side.

'Now now,' Raiku said, voice shrill with panic, 'he's just being a shit! Ha-ha,' she said pointedly, patting Daisuke on the shoulder. 'It was funny! He's being funny.'

'Hilarious,' Daisukenojo said. Smugly. Like an idiot. Raiku broke out in a cold sweat. Abruptly, a knock on the door broke the tense silence.

Raiku threw up her hands, more out of hysterical relief than anything. 'How many people did you invite to this?!'

'Morning!' Sakura said cheerfully, entering the room with clipboard in hand. 'How are you guys doing? I'm here to check on Yamada.'

Raiku cast her eyes heavenward. 'Of course you are.'

This fortunately stole Daisukenojo's attention, the fickle bastard having been fascinated by Sakura since he'd seen her punch a wall in half. That was one thing that really did stand in Daisukenojo's favour: he wasn't intimidated by strong women however literal the adjective was.

'Liar,' Ryuu mouthed to her behind Sakura's back. Raiku widened her eyes innocently and did her best to look wounded.

'Hey, I was actually hoping to run into you,' Sakura said over her shoulder as she did something mysteriously medical with Yamada's IV. 'I'm getting lunch with my new teammate and some friends, want to come?'

'I have plans,' Ryuu said immediately.

Sakura didn't even slow down, slowly injecting a syringe of clear liquid into Yamada's IV port. 'Didn't say when it was.'

'I have a lot of plans,' he replied.

'You never have plans, you only have schemes,' Raiku grumbled. Ryuu quirked a brow but had apparently made his stance clear enough for his liking.

'I was really just talking to Raiku,' Sakura said, pulling on a rubber glove with an ominous snap. She turned to face Raiku with a slightly strained smile, not that Raiku could blame her: Ryuu had that effect on people. 'You guys would be welcome to come, but our new teammate is kind of…' she trailed off. Raiku could have sworn she saw her eye twitch. 'He's… Well, I know Raiku more than you two, and we're sort of taking the introductions… slowly.'

Raiku looked at Sakura like she'd peeled off her face to reveal she was a machine piloted by millions of spiders. 'What?' She immediately realised she couldn't express her horror at the idea of Sakura knowing her and quickly followed with, 'why?'

Sakura exhaled short and sharp, but not powerfully enough to be a huff. 'Do you want to come or not? It's going to be me, him, Naruto and Ino. Chouji might make it as well.'

Raiku hesitated.

On the one hand, she'd done her due diligence by checking on Yamada and was now desperate to leave the room. On the other…

She hadn't sought Sakura out, that was definitely clear, but should she agree? That would surely be uncharacteristic of any Gairano, so even being confused about it was probably a sign that she was being unnaturally drawn to consider it. Did that count as an unusual urge to seek out Characters? Or was this a happy medium, where she'd been sought out and had the option of interacting with them before the Plot achieved potency? The fail-field should be able to repel the Plot enough at a nascent stage that she didn't get involved, and it just bounced off the way it should. But wait, how was that going to work if the Plot was still young enough that it was vulnerable to being dispersed by the fail-field? Could that even happen with main storyline—

'Sure!' Daisukenojo said, interrupting Raiku's spiralling thoughts by clapping her on the shoulder so hard and pointedly that her teeth clicked together painfully. 'We'll both go.'

That.

 _Floozy_.

Raiku ground her teeth together, hoping the mask hid the tensing of her jaw. Sakura smiled. 'Good, we're having it at noon, in the restaurant just down the street from the hospital. The one next to the second-hand store?'

Daisuke's grip tightened on her shoulder. 'Yeah, I know the one. See you there!' He quickly steered Raiku out of the room, Ryuu slipping out and closing the door behind them. As soon as it was shut she shook him off roughly, shooting him a pointed glare that he happily ignored. 'You guys wait for me downstairs, I've gotta drop something off to my mother,' he said, waving them off. 'Good talk. Toaster, don't even think about trying to get out of this. You owe me.'

Raiku let air hiss out from between her teeth. He was right. He certainly didn't have to turn on Ryuu as fast as he had. But  _still_. Lunch with Naruto?

Not her fault, she chanted mentally; not her fault. She didn't decide. Daisuke did. Didn't count.

Wait a second.

'You can't leave me with him!' she protested. But she was already talking to Daisuke's back, and he just sent her a jaunty wave over his shoulder.

The seething rage machine that was Ryuu said nothing from behind her. After a few minutes of her waiting for an attack that never came, she and Ryuu made their way down the stairs in tense silence. She half expected him to turn on her, to demand answers like he'd clearly wanted to before Sakura came in, but he didn't say anything. In fact, by the time they left the stairwell he seemed calmer, perhaps more grounded by Daisuke's absence. She loved that angry little guy, but Daisuke really did have the most catalysing effect on Ryuu's anger levels. She wouldn't call him "calm" when it was just the two of them, but he almost never got to the apocalyptically enraged level that Daisukenojo seemed to get a weird kick out of. Though, she had to wonder if that was really worse than the intense, slow-boiling variant that her presence seemed to prompt. The two of them settled by the sliding doors, taking up two of the waiting room seats.

Raiku drummed her fingers on her knees for a few seconds, until Ryuu flicked his hand and cracked his knuckles into the bony part of her wrist. While she clutched at the joint and emitted a high-pitched, quiet screaming noise from the blinding pain, he settled more firmly into his chair.

'To be clear, I still don't buy it,' he announced, slouching down.

Raiku's fingers were twitching uncontrollably from the pain. She bit her lip to try and stop the noise, but it honestly felt like he'd smacked her across the back of the hand, hard, with a bamboo switch. How did he do that?! What kind of evil magic was he—

'I'll let it slide for now. But I promise you: I'll get the truth out of you eventually.'

Raiku glared at him with watering eyes. 'You're willing to die on this hill?' she hissed.

'Honestly?' Ryuu bared his teeth at her briefly, a flash of white that she'd been long conditioned to shudder at. ' _Yes_.'

The two of them glared at each other until Ryuu jerked his chin up; Daisukenojo had emerged from the stairwell doors across the lobby, neatly sidestepping a patient in a wheelchair speeding past with undue haste. By unspoken agreement, they stood, shedding their enraged expressions. Well, Raiku did, but hers wasn't permanent like Ryuu's. They turned and walked out of the doors, feeling the rush of warm air just as Daisukenojo caught up and fell into step beside them.

'So… what do we do until Yamada is recovered?' Raiku asked, injecting some cheer into her voice through sheer bloody-mindedness, kicking a pebble in her way. 'Like, take on little Genin missions to earn some extra money, or… train?'

Ryuu considered. 'Well, today you're going to lunch with the Sunshine Brigade,' he said with trace amounts of spite.

 _Don't remind me_ , she almost said, before she forcefully swallowed the words and instead creased her eyes in a pseudo-smile.

He continued. 'In general, restock and train is my vote. Hatori is doing up the mission report this afternoon for the team, and he's got his story straight. We're basically at a loose end until we find out how much long Yamada will take to recover.'

'Daisukenojo,' Daisukenojo said loudly. 'You know my name.'

'I don't want to be on such familiar terms with you.'

Raiku turned her head slightly to keep her ear away from Daisuke's inevitably loud response, but he just grumbled incoherently to himself. A sudden bump made her look down to see Ryuu's arm stretched out, having caught her across the chest to stop her. She looked over at him curiously, but he'd just stopped her to apparently… glare at Daisuke suspiciously.

Raiku shifted back from Ryuu's still outstretched arm as Daisukenojo glared back. Ryuu turned to move away and Raiku relaxed, but he turned on his heel with blinding speed to kick Daisukenojo in the side before she could react.

Daisukenojo exploded into a puff of smoke.

Voices emerged from the tiny smoke-cloud before it even started to dissipate. 'No fair!' A tiny redhead, androgynous in their extreme youth, was the first to become visible.

'Yeah!' the identical child perched on their shoulders agreed. 'No fair!'

' _Hatoris_ ,' Ryuu said grimly, narrowing his eyes at the  _inexplicable stack of children_.

'Again?' Raiku asked faintly.

Ryuu put his hands on his hips, looking down at the two small children with a fierce glare. 'Where the hell is your brother?'

'Bad word,' the top one criticised.

'How old are you?' Raiku asked incredulously. 'Like, four?' She could barely do a henge at seventeen, where did they get off?!

'Almost six!' the lower one said with a mortally offended frown.

'So, five,' Ryuu said flatly. The child pulled a face at him. 'Where's your brother?'

They grinned in unison. It was… unsettling.

'Right,' Ryuu muttered, jaw set in a way she hadn't see in years; like he had a strand of grass between his teeth. Whatever had happened to that trait? He nodded. 'I'm gonna kill you,' he told the twins, and took a single step forward. They immediately tumbled off each other with a shriek and started running with surprising haste in the other direction. She honestly couldn't believe that speed—was it their low centres of gravity?

Ryuu surprised her then as well, simply shaking his head instead of taking off in hot pursuit. 'Idiots,' he said.

Raiku shot him a sidelong look. 'Did you actually know it wasn't him or did you just want to kick Daisuke for the intervention?'

Ryuu smiled beatifically. 'Don't you have a lunch to brace for?' he asked, sticking his hands in his pockets and smugly sauntering ahead.

Son of a bitch.

 

 

 

 

 

_Raiku,_

_It has been a while since your last letter. You should write again._

_Gaara_


	71. exciting social incompetence

There was something in the middle of the road.

Raiku shifted uncomfortably in place, her hands in her pockets.

She couldn't see it. There was no smell, no sound, but somehow she knew It was there.

It was in the middle of the road. A Device.

Raiku lifted a hand to rub at the side of her neck, eyes almost watering from how intensely she was scouring the road for some sign that could tell her that it was the Gairano in her seeing the Device, rather than… the rest. But there wasn't. It was just… sitting there. And she knew they were passive, unthinking things, just gravity wells that Plot would fall into and be distorted by, but somehow, it didn't feel like that was the case.

The Device sat there and waited.

It was an uncomfortable thought, because no; a thing without a mind couldn't wait. A lens could not be patient, could not possess the expectation of light for it to bend and refract.

The Device sat, invisible and unknowable, in the middle of the street. Pulsing, minor Plots curved around a hidden epicentre, twisting on the way through. She took a step to the side, getting ready to walk around it, and she left out a breath she hadn't registered holding when she felt it stay where it was.

Well, she reprimanded herself; what had she been expecting? It wasn't there for her, and Devices weren't Plots, they didn't stalk people. It had just appeared where the Genematrix needed it to, like they all did. It was  _Konoha_ , for god's sake. It was more a concern that she knew, somehow, that it was there.

It occurred to her that she should tell her father it was there: she couldn't see it, but surely her sudden knowledge of it had to be good for something? He might even be able to tell her what it was, if he could take a closer look at the Plots it was enabling.

Yes! She could do that. Raiku sidestepped again, continuing to face the causal black hole in the middle of the street. She kept this up, wincing each time someone walked through the seemingly empty space. How could they not feel it? Well, she knew how, obviously, but its presence was so solid in her mind, so impossibly vast in such a small, circular space.

No, she corrected herself quickly, ignoring a woman giving her a very strange look for her totally normal sidestepping. Not a presence. She stepped over a shopfront's flowerbed to continue avoiding the Device's limit.

Not a presence, she thought again; not a presence, like it was a being, or had a mind. She wasn't sure what to call it, but it wasn't that.

'What are you doing?'

Raiku looked up, one foot still braced on the shop display she was edging over. Damn shops, taking up outside space like they owned the damn sidewalk.

The second she registered the pink, she knew the day was a lost cause. Sakura looked at her with her eyebrows raised, Naruto standing with his hands shoved in his pockets at her side. He smiled, as bright and merciless as the sun. 'What up, Raiku?'

Raiku smiled. Grimaced, really, but fortunately the mask would just show her usual eye creases. 'Nothing,' she chirped like she didn't have a foot up on someone's table, dredging up the old cheerful verb in a desperate attempt at damage control.

Sakura sighed to herself, but it was fond. It wasn't the first time she had sighed, since Raiku seemed to have that effect on almost everyone, but she really would never get used to any kind of affectionate adjective from a Character. Still, if it got her out of the situation with a description of "eccentric" rather than "needlessly shifty", she'd take it.

Shit. Ino and Chouji were there too, equal parts gorgeous and Kabuki-esque, but she could be forgiven for not noticing them immediately. Whether they'd also chalk this up to Gairano weirdness was another thing she'd have to pray for later.

'Nothing!' she repeated, just for good measure.

'Liar,' a cheerful male voice said.

Raiku tensed.

Sakura reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose. 'Gairano Raiku, Sai. Sai, Raiku,' she said, eyes closed and taking a deep, slow breath.

Raiku turned to the speaker.

Well. Her dad  _had_  said ersatz Sasuke. But the sight of him standing  _so close_  still hit like a brick of anxiety, right into the solar plexus.

She tried to focus on the details of the pale and dark-haired, dark-eyed boy, trying to distinguish him from both Sasuke and the Plot wrapping like quicksand around his feet. It was unkind, but she couldn't dispel the kind of photo-copy-Sasuke impression; their new teammate had the same sharp-featured, elegant handsomeness that Sasuke had, that even the failed proto-Sasukes like Ryuu had ended up with. But more muted, thankfully. His plainly cut, straight hair was more lead-dark than the thick, pure black that the Uchiha inevitably sported, eyes more like graphite than ink.

In truth, the fact that the unflattering cloak he wore in the same shade of grey was something no Uchiha would have been caught dead in, that helped a fair bit. Plus there was the fact he was not so much elegantly pale as he was terrifyingly corpse-pale.

She relaxed slightly. Handsome, sure. That was a given. Standing between Naruto and Sakura, some vaguely Character-driven story arc hanging off him, that was a given too.

The completely insincere smile, though – that ruined it. Raiku told herself hers was better, but absently and self-consciously touched her own contrived smile.

She realised, meeting his eyes again, that while she had been examining him he had been doing the same to her, just as closely. 'Hi,' she said, sliding off the table fully and stepping back into the road, having safely completing her circuit of the Device. She'd given that circle of impossible patience and stillness a wide enough berth that she felt a little more secure. 'Nice to meet you,' she added.

Sai closed his eyes again and reduced them to slits lined with infuriatingly flawless eyelashes. A sign of duplicity in any Character it appeared in, so apparently the ersatz Sasuke was going to be even more thematically straightforward than the original.

'Nice to meet you, Liar,' he said pleasantly.

Raiku cringed. To her great surprise, so did Naruto.

'Sai!' he groaned. 'You're killing me here! She's not a liar! She's just—' he gestured at Raiku, an odd up-down motion that seemed to somehow indicate that not only was her table-stepping not unusual, it was totally normal. 'Haven't you started enough fights today?!' Actually, he did have a bruise on his cheek. So did Sai.

Sai kept smiling. Raiku could basically see the words float into one ear and out the other. 'Please, call me Sai,' he said, inclining his head slightly.

Sakura shook her head, stomping forward. Through the Device, which did nothing.

Again, Raiku wasn't sure what she had been expecting. For it to move, for there to be some sign of it? There was never a sign. Only Tsuji had ever been able to see them, and her knowledge of it just didn't measure up.

Sakura caught Raiku by the elbow on the way through, keeping up her punishingly fast pace towards the restaurant. 'If I can get through this without murdering him, I'm going to call it a success,' she gritted out to Raiku. 'He's the  _worst_.'

Raiku threw a terrified look over her shoulder towards no one in particular; the Device, maybe, like it could introduce a meteor or sudden complication to get her out of this? Unfortunately it was intercepted by the guileless, bottle-blue eyes of Naruto, who just shot her a sheepish look.

Raiku shuddered and snapped her attention back to the restaurant. What a day. She could make out Daisukenojo through the glass of the front door, waiting by the hostess station. He turned and waved after a moment, just before Sakura pushed the door open and dragged Raiku inside.

'Hey, took you long enough,' he said, ignoring Raiku's silent pleas for help and failing to liberate her from Sakura's grip. 'You get lost?'

'My fault,' Sakura said dismissively, loosening her horrifyingly strong grip on Raiku anyway. 'We ran into her on the way here and introduced her to Sai.'

Daisukenojo raised his eyebrows. Took in Raiku's look of supreme discomfort. Leaned to the side to look around them just as the bell above the door rang.

'Uzumaki,' he said absently in greeting. Raiku winced, feeling the massive Plot potency of Naruto standing far too close, pressing against the invisible wall around her. There wasn't enough air in the room, there never was when Naruto was there; it was like he was an open flame, burning through all the oxygen.

She reminded herself to take deep breaths.

Daisukenojo bowed his head a little. 'Sai, right?' he asked.

'Nice to meet you,' Sai's pleasant but oddly monotonous voice returned. 'Freckles.'

Daisukenojo paused. '…Hatori, actually,' he corrected slowly. 'Hatori Daisukenojo.'

'Right, Freckles,' Sai agreed.

Raiku wasn't going to turn around and stare at him. She  _wasn't_.

'Would you like to follow me?' the hostess asked with a strained smile, clearly wanting the seven shinobi out of her waiting area and safely sequestered in a room somewhere.

Raiku ducked her head in greeting and awkwardly avoided Ino's sharp gaze, already clearly sizing up where Sai was going to land. She clambered over to the far side of the table and knelt immediately. After a moment of staring fixedly at the table she felt warmth along her side, the almost-contact that meant Daisukenojo had decided to finally be a decent teammate and protect her from sitting next to anyone she barely knew. She looked up to mouth thank you, or at least to give him a grateful look, and almost screamed in horror.

Sai glanced at her, like it was normal to sit basically pressed against a total stranger, then looked away.

Raiku gaped, then looked at where Daisukenojo was apparently actually sitting, on the opposite side of the table from her.

He grimaced but didn't say anything. Fantastic.

'Sai, hey Sai, come sit by me,' Naruto said quickly, sprawling on the opposite corner. He waved him over, to no effect.

'I'm already sitting,' Sai replied. Which. Was… true. And the problem.

Naruto shot Raiku another sheepish look, which she returned with one of abject horror. Both because Naruto was, inexplicably, trying to help her and also because he was failing. Ino settled in on Sai's other side immediately, that sweet Sasuke-smile on her face again. It was almost enough for Raiku to feel nostalgic, though as usual the thought of Sasuke made her skin crawl.

'Is there a problem?' Sai asked, looking between her and Naruto.

Raiku tried to smile. It didn't come out right.

Sai paused in his perusal of her. 'Something's wrong,' he guessed.

'She's probably had enough of creepy intense guys in her space,' Chouji said around drool, flicking between pages of meat banquets.

Raiku's mouth twisted. 'Ryuu does think boundaries are something that happens to other people,' she hedged, earning a weird look from Chouji that she immediately returned in kind. What, so it was only okay if he said it? Wait, was this a teammate thing? Was she not meant to agree with muttered comments about members of her team?! Raiku quickly served herself some more rice, silently cursing social cues and their failure to be written down anywhere in plain format.

'Ryuu's our other teammate,' Daisuke added by way of explanation. 'He couldn't make it.'

Sai nodded. And didn't move away.

Raiku hunched into herself a little more.

The time it took them to order food and settle in seemed to stretch on forever, especially with small talk, and not just because waiting for food always seemed to take too long. Raiku was hyperaware of the seconds as they ticked past, of every breath she took. Of her hands, clenching and unclenching on her legs.

When the meat had finally arrived, the smell barely registered. There was too much acid burbling in her stomach and it left a sour taste in her mouth.

It had finally happened.

Naruto had ruined food.

Ignorant of Raiku's inner wailing, Sakura seemed to pray for patience as she heroically ignored Ino's chattering to Sai, and how she was serving him food in a typical Yamanaka flirtatious power-move.

'I guess Asuma and Shikamaru aren't coming.' Ino's words finally penetrated Raiku's depressed haze.

Chouji brightened. 'Sweet, I get his share—' he started, and reached for a particularly tender piece of beef, only for a metal chopstick to slam down through the grill between his fingers.

Eyes crackling and chopstick quickly superheating under the force of her charge, Raiku glared. So maybe Naruto hadn't ruined food entirely. Sue her, she was only mostly human.

Chouji, whose priorities often mirrored hers, paused. He just paused, really, like she wasn't emanating murderous intent.

'Chouji!' Ino snapped. 'Stop and introduce yourself to Sai!'

Chouji flinched at Ino's savage-sweet alternating tone. 'Oh! Right!' He cleared his throat and straightened, somehow forgetting to address the drool he had prematurely allowed to escape when he had  _thought he was getting what was rightfully Raiku's_. 'I'm Akimichi Chouji from the Akimichi Clan. Nice to meet you… Sai, right?'

Sai smiled his non-smile again. 'Nice to meet you, uh.'

He hesitated.

Raiku eyed him. Please god. Not another horrifying nickname. Across the table, Sakura and Naruto suddenly wore hunted looks.

He opened his mouth again. 'Fa—'

Naruto yelped and lunged across, ended up basically sprawled across the table with his hand pressed to Sai's mouth. Chouji tensed, brow furrowed.

Raiku had also tensed, mostly feeling the hideous heat of Naruto pressing into her elbow, where she had left her arm on the table like a fool, _a fool!_

'Sai!' Naruto hissed. 'Never ever _ever_  say "fatty" in front of Chouji!'

Sai's cool gaze regarded Naruto over his hand, a blankness to them that briefly reminded Raiku of another dark-eyed menace.

'Were you gonna say something?' Chouji rumbled, chopsticks clicking together briefly.

Raiku, already halfway through the contested meat portion, watched avidly.

'No, no! He wasn't!' Sakura said quickly, waving a hand. Chouji immediately settled back down with a seemingly satisfied hum, while Naruto mercifully withdraw.

The high pitch of Ino's "cute" voice took over. 'And I'm Yamanaka Ino, from Yamanaka Florists! It's such a pleasure to meet you!'

The Yamanaka  _Clan_ , Raiku corrected mentally, chewing with her mask already up. Funny how the Yamanaka always played up the nice hair and pretty flowers and left the "clan with proprietary techniques for mind control and possession" part unsaid. Why the cute voice, anyway? Ino was a fairly deadly kunoichi with a beautiful face, surely that was the attractive part, not some cute mannerisms?

Raiku raised her eyebrows at the thought while Sai apparently mused on a nickname; was this the much-vaunted lesbian thought process coming through? Were her father's highest hopes going to come to fruition?

She eyed Ino, leaning back to see her around Sai.

'Nice to meet you… Gorgeous,' Sai eventually said.

Ino blinked, startled, then blushed faintly.

Raiku shook her head and returned her attention to the food. Nope. Didn't do it for her in the slightest. Hopefully it was just that Ino wasn't her type, but apparently it wasn't that easy. At least Sai had dodged a bullet, anyway.

Naruto let out a whimper. Raiku looked up in time for the table to come flying in her and Sai's direction.

' _Why does Ino get to be Gorgeous!?'_

 

 

 

 

 

Sakura had managed to grit out an apology to Raiku for getting her caught in the crossfire of her attack on Sai, but Raiku would still be pulling splinters from her hair late into the night. Chouji had managed to stop the barbecue table from setting her and Sai on fire, sure, but they could never go back there and the far wall would probably need to be entirely rebuilt.

Raiku shifted uncomfortably while Ino worked her magic on the hostess; yes, that was a splinter that had somehow made its way down her shirt.

Awesome.

'Hey,' Daisuke muttered to her, jerking his head towards the door. 'Let's bail.'

Raiku could have kissed him. Sure, he would have died from it, but he had also abandoned her to Sai so that was just two birds with one stone. That was just  _efficiency._

'Well!' she said brightly, already edging out the door after him. 'This has been great! I will see you guys later!'

No one seemed to pay attention, so they made a break for it.

Only for Raiku to slam into Daisukenojo when he stopped suddenly. She frowned, just about ready to knock him over in her haste to leave. 'Hey, what's the hold up?!' she hissed.

She could have cut stone on the line of Daisuke's shoulders, he was so tense.

'You  _little bastards_ ,' he growled, clenching his fists. Raiku leaned around him to see a redhaired figure in the distance with a familiar stance and form.

Her eyebrows shot up. 'They really do like copying you, don't they?' she asked as Daisukenojo took off with a roar.

The distant Daisukenojo froze, then turned tail and sprinted off, the real one following close behind and letting out an incoherent yell of outrage.

'What was that?!' Naruto asked, slinging an arm around Raiku to brace him in leaning forward. 'He's so fast!'

Raiku took a slow, deep breath and pretended she couldn't feel the gravitational pull of Naruto trying to bend her, tugging at her sinews and bones that had never felt so fragile. 'It's his little brothers and sisters,' she forced out, unsure what her tone sounded like through the rush of blood in her ears. 'They. Have been copying him. So he's been, uh, trying to stop them.'

There was a feeling in her stomach, but she could barely register it enough to identify it. Was it nausea, or fear? Or some combination of both?

She'd been so close. She'd been so close to freedom. There was electrical charge building low in her chest that she didn't have much of a say in, another one of the stress-tics that had developed during her time in Iji. Not ideal.

Naruto let out a sharp laugh, then lifted his arm off her and settled into a more normal standing position at her side. He let the restaurant door swing closed behind them. 'Hey, so,' he said, lifting a hand to scratch the side of his face, 'you got the, uh, letter Gaara sent? I dropped it with your dad.'

Raiku nodded jerkily. It was that letter burning a hole in the pocket of her flak jacket.

Naruto nodded to himself, satisfied. 'I'm glad he's made some more friends,' he said. 'He's always been a really lonely guy, you know?' He smiled, giving her a sidelong look.

Raiku looked back out at the road, the space where the Device had been and wasn't anymore, leaving nothing but a sinking feeling. Really, in terms of composition it was the closest thing she had to a peer, and she was just relieved it was gone. 'I guess I do,' she lied.

Naruto nudged her with an elbow, almost startling sparks from her. 'Hey, Raiku?'

Raiku hummed high in her throat, reluctantly glancing at him but unable to hold it. Naruto, being the kind asshole that he was, waited for her to, struggling all the way, maintain eye contact before he continued. 'It's really cool of you. Writing to him, I mean. All this time. I know he can seem pretty… terrifying?' He let out another laugh.

 _Internal screaming: as long as it stayed internal, no one had to know!_  Raiku thought hysterically, managing a strangled noise and a nod.

'A-nyway,' Naruto said, thumbing his nose and looking slightly sheepish. 'Sorry about Sai. I know it's probably weird for you, right? He's super bad at that stuff, you can just shove him away.'

Raiku wasn't sure how to feel about Naruto apparently taking note of her need for personal space. Horrified? Maybe… Vaguely violated? Yeah, that seemed about right.

'Ha, maybe!' She was twitching uncontrollably, she had to go or he'd know she was terrified rather than awkward. He was pretty good at picking up on those cues, but then, the world did arrange itself that way. 'Well, I'm gonna catch up to Daisuke! Catch you later, Naruto!' She quickly marched off, shoving trembling hands into the pockets of her flak vest.

'Seeya. Oh yeah, Kakashi's in hospital! You could go see him if you want!' Naruto called after her.

Raiku threw a wave over her shoulder and rounded the corner, immediately stopping to brace her hands on her knees and take a few huge, shuddering breaths. Gulping down air so rich in oxygen she could almost taste it.

She was going to kill Daisuke.

She looked up when she could finally slow her breathing to something approaching normal, eyes steely.

Next training session they had, she promised herself, she was going to—

Her hands sparked unexpectedly, charring the ends of her gloves. She hissed and tugged them to be a little looser, shaking them out.

Anyway. Clearly the universe got the point. She straightened and rolled her shoulders, but they were already sore from the tension she'd been carrying around. So. She had some unexpected downtime between The Lunch and her next training session. A whole… half-day of liberation.

Raiku tilted her head thoughtfully.

She could spend it scheming against Daisukenojo; that was an appealing thought.

Her eye twitched as she wondered whether this warm, bloodthirsty feeling was how Ryuu felt all the time. Her own destructive urge was generally more reflexive rather than premeditated and felt like nothing in particular. Well. Natural. It felt natural, effortless, in a way she was starting to recognise made a lot of sense. It made… blood-sense. Bone-sense. It made the kind of sense that a body did.

She shook her head quickly, because that was going nowhere. A Device thinking about being a Device? Too recursive.

 _Plans_.

She tapped her foot, standing in the sunshine of an uncomplicated Konoha sidestreet. It was warm, and there was a breeze that just smelt like clean air that started to unwind the tension still caught in her hands and stomach.

She closed her eyes and inhaled.

Exhaled.

Raiku hadn't been at a genuinely loose end in years. Not for any length of time. She might actually have a brief time window for her interests, which was basically unprecedented since she'd become a Chuunin.

She opened her eyes, blowing some over-long white hair out of her face.

Interests.

Raiku's interests.

The interests of Raiku.

Which were…

A gaggle of shrieking children passed her on the street while she tried to narrow down something, anything in that category. Her mental file under that name was depressingly blank. She'd liked electronics when she was younger, but she'd basically given that up during the timeskip in favour of letters.

So, letters?

Iwao had stopped writing a while ago. Realistically he had either finally had enough or died. She would eventually have to write back to Gaara, but ideally that could be put off until she reached legal drinking age.

Now that it was no longer held at bay by panic, the distant noise of the village around her filtered into her brain more and more as she grew calmer, trying to settle on something to pursue. Her friends were her teammates and family, neither of which she was particularly inclined to seek out before training and after her freakout, respectively. So she'd have to pick something else.

Easy.

She just had to pick… something to do.

And after the seconds just ticked by, Gairano Raiku realised she had no idea what normal people did. Not in their free time, or in the spaces around shinobi life that they carved out for themselves. She could list activities and rattle off schedule patterns, but she didn't have a life outside being a shinobi or a Gairano.

Raiku scratched her head.

Huh.

She looked around for ideas in the absence of any obvious guidance. She was pretty close to the main road and it was a lovely day, she could afford to notice without Naruto taking up all the space in it. The sun was out, the sky was a kind of stereotypical blue, the birds were singing, the steady thrum of the village's electrical grid was in the air—

Nothing helpful, in other words.

She started wandering absently down the footpath, head tilted back so she could bask in the sunlight. Her senses weren't top-notch, but she was still good enough to bump into anybody. Probably. There was a chance.

Anyway. What did Daisuke do for fun? Could she just copy that? Shit, no, he gardened with his family, it was a whole thing. Raiku had electrokinetic thumbs and possessed an ambient electrical field, she was the grim spectre of death to all plants.

…Ryuu…?

Despite the warm air, Raiku shivered. She hopped up onto the wall running along the footpath when the opportunity presented itself, continuing her long meander up high where it was inexplicably just more comfortable.

Yamada seemed to spend his free time training or doting on his loving, terrifying family, but she already had plans to train later and didn't find it particularly helpful to do it alone. People in general seemed to want to spend time with friends whenever they could, but Raiku saw her friends pretty often and didn't at all mind being alone in between. It was less complicated, less full of exciting new ways in which she could find herself socially at a loss.

She stopped when the wall ended at a busy street junction, dropping into a crouch and perching there to watch people pass by below, civilians going about their lives and shinobi ducking in between. Plot slicing through the masses occasionally on their way elsewhere or pulled behind someone specifically.

Honestly, this wasn't bad just on its own, she mused. She had nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one to run from. The absence of violence was new and a little weird, but overall it was almost relaxing; she could just go wherever she wanted. Was it interesting enough to be an interest, just… walking around, watching people?

She watched an enterprising sparrow make for a little boy carrying bread, following the least predatory bird in the world as it went for the golden opportunity.

It probably wasn't, she had to concede, when the boy decided to just give it some crumbs from the mess he had already made. She might have liked it, but a person needed interests, a complex internal world. Gairano were big on hobbies and aspects to your life outside your job and family. It was a miracle she'd been allowed to let it slide for so long, even after her dad discovered what she was. Especially then.

She tilted her head back again, shading her eyes to look at the perfectly blue sky.

There was that, she supposed. She could try to see if there were any other Devices floating around Konoha, to tell her dad. It wouldn't be wise to interact with them, but she would eventually have to try and figure out the parameters of her non-human status. Origin? She wasn't clear on how to refer to it. She felt human. Or thought she did, as she didn't have much of a frame of reference. But trying things out in Konoha, where her dad could reach her within minutes and would know if something went wrong, that wasn't a bad idea.

Paranoid, she tried to test the thought for veracity. Was that a Raiku thought? Or was that a Genematrix suggestion? Raiku wasn't exactly the type to expose herself to major Narrative risks, but then, identifying Devices for the purposes of being able to stay away from them, that was just intelligent avoidance. And if there was one thing Gairano did well, it was avoidance.

Raiku stood, absently brushing some loose mortar off the brick wall with one foot. She cracked her knuckles then stretched her laced fingers overhead, limbering up.

Then she sort of stopped, awkwardly, because that was as far as she'd thought ahead.

Maybe there would be one… where there were lots of people? But when she looked down across the street, despite the people pushing through it, she couldn't feel anything. She frowned, glancing towards the Hokage mountain and the building at the foot of it.

Major Plot points tended to congregate there. The Gairano who worked there basically had to swing by to see her father whenever they came home every day, to try and dispel any lingering traces they may have tracked back with them. Even then, no matter what their job was there it was classified as high risk. So logically, a Device would made a lot of sense where there was Narrative potential to work with. Or did they only appear for weaker Plots that needed reinforcing? She shrugged and leapt forward, springing from rooftop to rooftop to get closer anyway. It was worth a shot, after all.

The air got imperceptibly thicker the closer she got, until she eventually ended up perched on top of a telephone pole, as high and far away from the ground-floor Plot fiesta that covered the square. Shinobi passed through faster here, or just walked to and from their more administrative duties. It was basically a bingo-card of identifying characteristics: unnatural hair colour here, improbable scar there, tragic backstories everywhere, all moving around beneath her.

She eyed a Genin getting too close to her perch, who immediately pretended she hadn't been creeping in on Raiku's spot. Damn. High perches like the one she'd scored were hot real estate wherever shinobi were around. She settled more fully into her crouch, resting comfortably on her haunches, and took in the sights. She also took a moment to internally gloat about being taller than everybody else since her and Ryuu were only just about the same height after her latest growth spurt and she needed the ego boost.

Scanning the area, she tried to hold on to that quiet feeling of peace. After a few minutes of looking, this was made easier by the fact that there were no Devices to be seen. Nothing. There was Plot—enough to make her dizzy and sick with it, to make her skin itch – but she didn't have that same… feeling again. If there was a Device present, she couldn't identify it.

Raiku tugged her ear absently as she thought. Devices were thought by the Gairano to be reasonably rare, mostly due to their efficiency. The Genematrix didn't need a lot of them floating around when a single one could imbue any number of Plots with new attributes, or so the Gairano theorised. They'd only been able to detect a few duplicates of the very commonly used Devices, while the larger and more profoundly transformative ones tended to stay in a single place for extended periods.

But all of it was conjecture. Their inability to see the Devices made it all pure guesswork. And it was highly educated guesswork, because the entire family revolved around the Genematrix, albeit in a very different way to most people, but that was what it boiled down to.

Raiku straightened and shifted to the side, before a powerful surge through her feet forced her to jump away from the sudden  _bang!_  and explosion of splinters.

For the second time that day, Raiku found herself being gently showered with wood fragments, where apparently she'd been so focused on Devices that she'd  _let herself blow up the top of the telephone pole_.

She coughed.

She could feel eyes on her.

She reluctantly peered over the roof she'd jumped to, dozens of shinobi faces staring where she'd damaged public property. Weapons had been drawn, but when they saw her familiar head of hair and mortified expression, the general atmosphere seemed to lift.

Raiku wasn't sure how to feel about that.

'Sorry!' she called weakly, lifting a hand to wave. A set of tiles near her exploded in a flash and the sudden smell of ozone, leaving her fingers tingling. She yelped and clutched the treacherous appendage back to herself, unwilling to look down and meet the judgemental stares she could feel.

'Are you serious!?' she hissed to her unreliable fingers and the second set of gloves she'd damaged that week. 'We couldn't keep it together for a single day?!'

Her hand, predictably, did not address the issue.

She sighed, blowing on her fingers before carefully, carefully putting her hands back in her pockets. Apparently walking around aimlessly was going to have to be her fallback because if just trying to eyeball another Device was setting off spontaneous power surges that she  _still_  couldn't get a handle on, then she'd have to put off developing any hobbies until Yamada had beaten it out of her. Trained. Trained it out of her. She'd had issues with controlling output in the past, but mostly it boiled down to her either not particularly wanting to—she could admit that—or it being one of the automatic features she'd never been able to control to begin with, like her skin. While traumatic, she couldn't ignore the fact that Iji had given her a bad habit, even if it was a subconscious one. Or that was what she was hoping it was, because the alternative of "randomly sending out electricity bolts of varying intensity" wasn't an appealing development.

Raiku briefly considered asking her dad for advice. An image of him sitting her down to awkwardly talk about hormones and their theoretical interaction with electrokinesis flashed through her mind.

She shuddered, starting to descend from the roof back onto the street.

No, no. Training it would be.


	72. ambiguously homoerotic commentary aside

_Dear Gaara. Of the Sands?_

_No no no_

 

_Dear Gaara the Kazekage_

_that is an awkward way to start a letter Raiku_

 

 

_Dear Gaara,_

_Hello, I am doing well! I heard you almost died (did die?) but I am glad to hear that you are doing better. Better enough to write to me! Me, even, since I'm probably directly related to all those horrible things happening_

 

 

_Dear Gaara,_

_It was good to hear from you that's a lie it was scary FOR THREE YEARS I WROTE LETTERS WHY IS THIS SO HARD_

 

 

 

 

"Alright, minions!"

Raiku took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the sweet scent of nostalgia. Yamada, bellowing at them from the side of a training field. It was like she was a kid again. Well. A kid or a young adolescent. A kid or a slightly younger teen. It felt like normal, really, when she thought about it. Which was still nice!

The man in question was sitting rather than looming the way he always had previously, but that could be forgiven since he wasn't technically allowed to be out of the hospital. The hospital gown couldn't manage it despite its best attempt - she had long accepted trivial things like clothes wouldn't diminish his ability to threaten her, even as the gown fluttered gently in the breeze.

"As you may or may not have realised, things are getting serious around here!"

'Could've sworn we've almost died like a thousand times already, felt pretty serious to me,' Daisukenojo muttered to her. Raiku nodded fervently.

Yamada wasn't one to let that salient point slow him down. "International tension is rising, missions are getting more serious, and people are going to expect you to be the finely-honed killing machines that your qualifications promise you are."

No "get me", she realised. He was actually trying to make a serious point right now. Not a good sign.

Yamada's expression was more grave than foreboding, really. She should have noticed. She'd felt more and more relaxed since she had gotten back to Konoha, which had made her father frown and disappear to wherever he went to analyse Plot. Apparently having a sentient force of Destruction feeling more at home wasn't exactly a good thing, though he'd given her one of their famous only-slightly-stunted hugs to try and ease the sting of that assessment.

"If we can't get you guys to Jounin level—or at least somewhat like it—by the time this all comes to a head, you are gonna die. Do you get me?" Yamada wasn't yelling. His gravelly voice was even. "You'll die."

Daisukenojo had gone pale under his freckles, Raiku realised when she snuck a look along the line. Ryuu's expression was unreadable. Raiku, who had at least had some warning in the form of dark ropes of Plot stretching across streets and homes to mark Naruto's evolution moving forward, was starting to feel a hot flush of fear in her chest. She didn't want to die. Not for someone else's foreshadowing. She didn't want to be the casualty that made Naruto realise that the world was a dark place. The idea of it being Ryuu or, heaven forbid, poor Daisukenojo, made her feel vaguely nauseated. She wanted to die far out of that kind of Dramatic nonsense, where she could be sure she was herself.

Whatever  _that_  was, she thought with a dark sort of amusement.

Yamada cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. Or tesseracted his shoulders, really, because a mere three dimensions would have trouble encompassing that much human being. "So let's get down to shaping up you goddamn disasters!" He pointed directly at her. "Versatility!" He moved his finger from her to Daisukenojo. "Technique integration!" Then to Ryuu. "Endurance!"

' _I_  get endurance?!' Ryuu demanded. ' _Me_?!' He threw a hand out towards Raiku. 'She has the width and durability of a twig! Hers is just as bad!'

Raiku shrugged; he had a point.

Yamada scoffed. "She takes a sleeve off and the person who hits her gets a one-way ticket to meet his maker, get me?! You on the other hand, you don't kill them in the first two minutes of direct confrontation and you lose steam. Her problem is that she can only kill them or run off, either of which she can do until she drops. Long after you've murdered your way to a nap, get me?!'

'But,' Raiku felt compelled to point out, 'I am extremely good at those two specific things, so. I think I should get a pass.'

 _You are destruction_.

Raiku let herself blink, but her expression of optimism for this excuse didn't falter. 'Yep.'

Yamada glowered, folding his arms over some misappropriated scrubs in a size she was honestly surprised the hospital stocked. "You need to be able to do a wider variety of things, Speedy, get me?!"

She sighed.

'I think mine was fair,' Daisukenojo said thoughtfully. 'I don't use techniques that much. I can see that.'

'You know,' Raiku muttered to him, 'when you're not flipping your lid, your general attitude makes us all look hysterical.'

'You are hysterical.'

" _Anyway_!" The three of them snapped to attention. "This works out well. Sullen, Shorty," gesturing between Ryuu and Daisuke, "consider yourselves joined at the hip for sparring. Shorty, you don't use techniques and he'll kill you, get me? He's gonna draw back and suffocate you before you can touch him. Straight kill you."

'Metaphorically?' Daisukenojo asked, his air of defeat already answering his question.

"Literally. Sullen, that freckled bastard will get inside your guard and just hammer at you until you crack. Unless you can condition up alongside normal training, he's gonna break that pretty face right in half."

Raiku glared briefly at Ryuu's pretty face. If only the world were so lucky.

"And Speedy. You." Yamada stared at her shrewdly. "You're gonna be tricky."

Raiku winced.

"Normally I'd sic your crazy doppelganger on you, but he's got his own students to worry about." Even without the additional trauma carried with any mention of Kakashi, Yamada's stare was never a pleasant thing to endure when your fate was in his hands. The squinting made it worse. "I called in a couple of favours for your sorry self. Which was expensive, get me? Not to mention I've gotta put them up in  _my house_  and let me tell you, Suzu was  _not_  happy they arrived when I was away with you lot, get me?"

Them? That wasn't good.  _That wasn't good_. And  _arrived?_

Yamada shifted, which could have been due to him not having healed properly or could have been due to another, more difficult kind of discomfort. Raiku prayed he'd torn a stitch storming over to the training ground. Maybe even gotten an infection.  _Please god_. "And now the son of a bitch is late."

Raiku, aghast, took a step back. 'What is happening?!' she demanded.

Yamada gestured between Ryuu and Daisuke. "While we're waiting, get yourselves ready. I'm gonna be watching you two like hawks, get me?"

Daisukenojo coughed, flushing.

"Yeah, that's right, little bastard—I remember your stunt at the first Chuunin exams. Get stretching!"

The three of them obediently started settling into stretches, which for Raiku mostly meant pointedly bending herself into improbable shapes while Daisukenojo glared from his more basic ones. He actually had very good flexibility for a more stocky shinobi, but he couldn't compete with her ectomorphic excellence. He could break her in half, but not compete.

Upside-down, Raiku stuck her tongue out at him from her effortless bridge. He pulled a face at her, bent over an outstretched leg to stretch his hamstring. Daisuke's arm at least was out of the cast, but his mother likely hadn't healed him with this in mind. After a few minutes of these shenanigans, Ryuu pushed Raiku over with his foot and put a stop to it. They were probably ruining the ominous air Yamada's warning had created.

Which was of course her goal, but she couldn't exactly tell any of them that.

After the horribly long time this always took shinobi, a powerful snap of Yamada's fingers brought them all back to attention. When they looked up at him, Yamada turned to the side, revealing a shinobi standing behind him.

Naturally, this was handled less than gracefully.

'Holy shit—!' Raiku helped, jumping back.

Daisukenojo choked on his mouthful of water. 'Did you have some guy standing behind you this whole time, who  _does_  that?!'

'What the fuck?!'

Yamada snorted. "You're disgraceful. He only just got here. Hatori, I expected better from you at least."

Raiku cautiously edged forward, leaning around Yamada to try and get a look at the newcomer.

It was embarrassing, how long it took her. The shinobi was not quite her height and more muscular, hair cropped so close to his head that it was more a shadow than an actual colour. He wore the usual tan and pale colours of a Sand shinobi and the vest of a Jounin, but other than being roughly her age she couldn't pin down anything more personal. He was handsome in a classically masculine way with dark brown eyes and skin, but it wasn't until her eyes caught on the colour around his eyes that something in her memory twinged. Bright yellow rimmed the outer edges of his eyes, matching the single yellow line that stretched all the way up his neck, cutting him vertically in half from where his chest was hidden by his vest up to the inner crease of his lower lip. It was that brightness and the Sand forehead protector tied to hang from a belt loop that finally cinched it.

'You have got to be shitting me,' Ryuu muttered.

Raiku found her voice. ' _Iwao_?'

Iwao nodded shortly, sombre eyes meeting hers.

'He's meant to be short!' Daisukenojo howled.

Yamada clapped a hand on Iwao's shoulder. "Stripe's teacher made me pay for this through the nose, but turns out your little friend here is an Earth technique specialist! Exactly what we need, a  _grounding_  influence, get me?!"

When the shocked silence reigned rather than any sort of acknowledgement of his admittedly superior wordplay, Yamada's cheerful expression vanished. "So. He's your new sparring buddy."

Raiku gave him a semi-aborted wave.

"Say hello, Stripe," Yamada prompted.

'Good morning,' Iwao said. His voice was low, but not gravelly like Daisuke's was, nor the same combination of deep and threatening like Ryuu's was.

Yamada squinted down at him, apparently trying to decide if that minor deviation counted as disobedience. He must have come down on the side of efficiency, because after a moment he shook it off. "Right, so this is how this is going to work." He pointed between Ryuu and Daisuke. "Like I said, you two! Pair off and start warming up. I'll be back to give you some specifics once these two are squared away, get me? Speedy, Stripe, you'll be coming with me, you'll be doing something different."

Raiku hedged around until Yamada walked past her, Iwao falling into stride easily behind him. She tried to walk next to him and found herself repeatedly lagging behind when she tried to covertly eye him alongside her, taking in the differences between the shy, short boy from her memory and the steady, calm young man standing next to her. He was older than her, wasn't he?

'Hi,' she whispered.

Iwao looked at her side-on. 'Hello,' he greeted, equally softly.

Raiku's fingers twitched at her sides. 'It's… good to see you?' she volunteered.

Iwao nodded. 'It's been a long time.'

 _Because you stopped writing_ , she didn't say, though it was her reflex.

To her profound shock, something warm crossed his expression before he turned back to where they were walking. 'My fault,' he added quietly.

Oh god. He had gone all soft-eyed for a second. How was she supposed to punch him in the face?! She  _hated_  the soft-eyed look that people with dark eyes could pull off; the most she could manage was manic, and it didn't have the same effect. Obviously. It mostly frightened people. It didn't make her eyes turn all liquid and warm. Daisukenojo could do it and he was a real son of a bitch about it,  _god_.

Yamada drew to a halt in the next training field over, a wide, grassy space dotted irregularly with trees. Probably because they were the only ones to survive previous training sessions.

Raiku sent them a silent apology. They certainly wouldn't survive this one.

There was a feeling that was rapidly becoming familiar, the sudden urge to keep walking towards some further point on from the field—if she had to guess, she'd say that Naruto was nearby, doing one of his legendary breakthrough training sessions. Or possibly another Main Character, drifting past with the world's worst timing. Trying to draw her in to facilitate, when it knew damn well she didn't have to be directly involved. She gritted her teeth against it, clearly marking the urge as alien and Plot-flavoured so she could set it aside.

Yamada turned, his hospital garb fluttering around his knees. He set massive hands on his hips. "Alright! I want a good, mean fight, and do not— _do not_ —try to kill each other! You get me?!"

Raiku widened her eyes, holding her hands up in front of her. 'Why are you looking at me?!'

Yamada folded his arms across his chest. "We just talked about your kill-or-run binary, Speedy! It's the whole reason he's here."

Iwao's eyebrows raised just a fraction. Raiku hastily waved her raised hands. 'No, no! He's making it seem like a, like an always thing! I don't  _always_ —'

"Always!" Yamada said with relish. "Kill or run, that's you!" He pointed at her, then at Iwao. "I want you to do your best to incapacitate this one, without murdering him. If I come back here and find him dead, you'll be in trouble, get me?!"

Raiku coughed. 'You make me sound like a serial killer,' she muttered.

Yamada's eyebrows shot up. He lifted one hand, tilted his head in a theatrically thoughtful expression, then started counting out on his fingers. Raiku watched, confused, for a moment, then gawked. 'Stop, stop!' she yelped, waving her hands quickly. 'Stop counting the murders! We'll start! Come on, Iwao, time to fight, chop chop!' She gave him a push and speed-walked over to the other side of the field, rolling her shoulders and flexing her hands. Yamada nodded, satisfied, and drew back to the edge of the treeline.

"Whenever you're ready, brats!" he called.

And with that, Raiku squared off against Iwao. Well, rhombus'd, given the angle the hovering put her at. She parallelogram'd him? It was bizarre, staring at this … aesthetic variation on someone she'd known a while ago, who she hadn't seen in person in years. Should she have had time to catch up first? Did this seem abrupt to anyone else?

Then again, she had to consider, no build-up was probably a good thing. Lots of Dramatic Foreshadowing wouldn't have been a good sign, while Yamada springing a new sparring buddy on her out of his sadistic need for efficiency was far more natural for their team dynamic.

She cupped her hands around her mouth to call, 'how is this going to work?'

Iwao seemed too relaxed. It was making her skin itch. He gestured with one hand. 'Attack, please.'

Raiku couldn't help it. She hesitated. No enemy had ever said "please" before, unless Ryuu's "oh  _please_  try it" counted and the sentiments seemed very different.

'Do you understand that you may die?' she called. Informed consent had featured in many of her lectures growing up.

Iwao nodded. He gestured again.

Raiku glanced nervously at Ryuu and Daisukenojo, who should have been fighting each other but instead were openly spectating at the edge of the training ground. She tugged her gloves off and rubbed her bare palms together, her pale skin immediately starting to crackle and glow. Iwao continued to watch her, seemingly unconcerned, even as the ball of electricity fed by her fingertips took shape.

She tried to make herself throw it at him. Just a little. But her elbows locked the moment she thought of it, keeping her hands close to her chest.

"Speedy! Just do it!"

She yanked her hands apart, electricity flooding back into her skin. 'He's just standing there!' she exclaimed, gesturing at him. 'I can't! He's just… staring at me!'

'His eyes are too dark and gentle, it's impossible!' Daisukenojo cried from the sidelines. Iwao cast him a neutral glance that made Daisukenojo hastily look at the sky. Raiku would have to examine that behaviour later.

Iwao then looked to Yamada, who just gave him a nod.

Then Iwao was gone.

Raiku froze, too much experience with Kakashi's own brand of training suddenly rearing its ugly head. Instinctively she yanked the rest of her sleeves off, leaving her bare from the shoulders down.

'Augh, the stripping!'

"Shut the hell up, Hatori, this is meant to be a fight!"

Raiku almost tore herself in half ducking when Iwao reappeared in a blinding blur of speed, kicking out where her head had been. She lashed out at his planted foot, unsurprised when he sprung away, and launched after him. She hissed when he twisted away from the bolt of electricity she sent after him, its decisive  _crack!_  splitting the air between them with the blinding flash. A spire of earth shot up between them – she braced and landed on it feet-first, pushing off to hit the ground again. She turned again and hastily blocked a blow so powerful it jarred her to the bone, realising a split-second too late that she had done so with her bare, glowing forearm.

A flash of panic made her stomach lurch, made her hesitate just enough for a following strike to send her back several feet, skidding in the dust.

When it cleared, there was a low cracking, rumbling noise.

She looked up and Iwao's dark eyes had turned yellow, black sclera against a skin that seemed to have turned to dark stone. When he tilted his head the noise sounded again – stone against stone. It had formed a layer so close to skin it may well have been a transformation, dim yellow light visible through the symmetrical, perfectly even seams.

Raiku tapped her mouth, caught up in her examination despite the way she could see Iwao flexing long stone fingers, then curling them into a fist.

A loud whoop broke her concentration.

'Bad _ass_!'

"Stop narrating, Shorty, so help me!"

Iwao tilted his head back to look at her down his nose, combining with the way he set his posture to make the unmistakable  _come at me_  stance that shinobi all seemed to know how to do instinctively.

Raiku settled low for a moment, then exploded towards him in a thunderous roll of lightning. He braced hard and they clashed together on contact with a sound like the sky splitting open, striking so hard that she felt like her bones were splintering at the point of contact.

She felt the grin split her face, sharp and fierce.

_This._

Iwao dropped his guard and dropped back in the same motion, letting her weight carry her forward so she could fall further into his reach. A boost of electricity sent her back in the air enough for her to twist and send her fist flying towards his face, a punch quickly parried. For a moment she fell into the familiar rhythm of strikes, relaxing into the thriving current of energy that was powering her attacks. At least, until Iwao managed to twist and knee her hard in the side, the heavy stone blow driving the breath out of her her. The harsh jolt of pain sent a shock through her that just dragged more electricity to the surface in response, like the flooding of white cells in an immune response. She drew lightning to her hand and drew it back, feeling the power arc and grow to a screaming, blinding mass of energy before preparing to snap it forward to—

A wall shot up between them, the force shoving them apart.

"Enough!" Yamada roared. Raiku caught herself about to snarl at him and forcibly reigned it back, almost biting through her tongue with the effort. Iwao settled back far more graciously on his other side, just visible under her teacher's arm. Yamada took a threatening step towards her, then stopped when she reluctantly backed up. "What did I say?! What was the one rule?! The point of this is not to murder him, Speedy!" Yamada snapped. "The point is to learn to dial it back without having to be afraid of  _accidentally_  murdering your partner, get me!? Murder! Isn't! The goal!" He capped it off by thudding his fist into his palm on every word for emphasis.

Raiku looked at the ground, trying to make her expression less sullen and just barely managing to contort her features into something more contrite. She took a deep breath.

'I'm sorry.' She looked up in surprise at the sound of Iwao's voice, the rumbling distortion of whatever the stone was doing to his throat. Iwao's burning-bright eyes were directed at Yamada, unflinching. 'I provoked her deliberately. It won't happen again.'

Yamada eyeballed him. "Don't even, Stripes," he growled. "It takes two to  _completely lose their shit,_ doesn't it Speedy?!"

'Yes…' she said reluctantly. It had been abrupt, even for her. She was just losing it all over the place, but at least there wasn't a nearby roof for her to destroy this time.

"And we're not going to create a diplomatic incident again, are we Speedy?!"

She kicked at the ground. 'No…'

Yamada glared, looking at them both in turn. Raiku quickly looked down, because the last thing she wanted to do was meet his eyes and challenge his dominance. Wait, was that a dog thing? Or was it a Ryuu thing? God, it was so hard to keep track. "Both of you, front and centre, now!"

Raiku shuffled over. When her and Iwao were directly in front of him, side by side, Yamada fixed them with That Look. The look all strict parents had down pat, the face that just screamed "well look what the cat dragged in."

"And  _what_  do you call that, Speedy?" he asked, when they'd fidgeted enough. When Raiku had fidgeted enough; Iwao was still, with enviable posture. "I call it attempted murder!"

'No! Wait! I mean, look!' Raiku smacked his shoulder with the back of her bare hand and laughed, delighted, when the shock immediately dissipated into the cool rock skin. 'Look at that, that's so cool! He's fine!'

"Careful," Yamada snapped. "He's not immune to you, he's just got a resistant layer to get through and direct earthing when his feet are planted on the ground. You can still fry him, get me? It'll just be harder to do by mistake when you're  _not_  actively trying to barbecue him."

She sighed, deflating. 'Yes, yes.'

"You get carried away and you'll cook him alive in that snazzy ground suit!"

'Okay!'

"Like a goddamn clay roast, he'll just sizzle in there—"

'Thank you,' Iwao said calmly. 'Understood.'

Raiku had found herself gripping her own shirt over the abdomen like she could squeeze the mental image out. She knew her face was contorted with disgust, the phantom smell of cooking flesh caught in her nose. 'Ugh, that's so graphic!'

Yamada waved a hand at her. "Move on, Speedy."

She still gagged, mostly just to annoy him. Petty, sure. Funny? A little. She could use the amusement.

He waved his hand. "Again. Once you two get the point, I've got to oversee the other two. So you'd better get it right. Go, go, go!'

Raiku scrambled back to their informal starting position immediately, fleeing Yamada's famously short patience.

All she had to do was  _not_  murder her highly capable sparring partner. How hard could that be?

 

 

 

 

 

Hours later, bruised to hell and feeling perilously close to scorched herself, Raiku finally collapsed to lie, panting, in the dirt. It was how she preferred to signal that she was done with training. She had perfected it over years of practice.

A shadow fell over her as Iwao came to stand near her head. Benefits of stone skin, she guessed; he didn't look half as beaten up as she did. But he was covered liberally in scorch marks, including a couple of incriminatingly hand-shaped ones. She was slightly reassured by how out of breath he seemed, even under the stone.

Still alive, though. That made the whole exercise a success.

She held her arms up. They felt like limp noodles, but the glow had simmered to a manageable level. It never made her feel worn out, like the electricity was a muscle she could overexert, but it did sometimes take on a sort of satisfaction after particularly sustained bouts of violence. It was a feeling that made more sense after recent developments.

'My arms,' she whined. 'Look at them.'

Said arms shook obligingly, wracked with exhausted tremors.

There was what could have been a huff, coming from something that wasn't a statue.

Get it. A statue.  _Because he was covered in stone_.

Even Raiku had to admit it wasn't her best. But she knew the drill from there—she would whine and then Kakashi or whichever sparring partner would beat her mercilessly past her point of—

Iwao bent and put his hands under her armpits, gripping her there just long enough to lift her from the ground and then set her on her feet. Raiku blinked, momentarily disoriented by suddenly being in a standing position and waiting for her tired brain to catch up. It always worked weirdly after she'd been going off instinct for a while, taking some time to come back online in a way she sincerely hoped was mirrored amongst her friends. He reached his hand out again when she wobbled, but she steadied again on her own.

'…Thank you?' she offered. She wasn't sure what the protocol was for situations like this. Was this when the fight started again? There was a reason Yamada hadn't picked on her endurance: Kakashi hadn't let her rest at the point of collapse, at least not the first time she faceplanted.

Iwao made a brief motion with his shoulders that flowed to his wrists, which then immediately started melting from stone back into skin. She watched, fascinated, as the dark rock turned back to brown skin, a flash of yellow paint at his wrists visible before he pulled his sleeves down. 'How much time does all the paint take?' she mumbled curiously, before he finally stood before her looking like himself.

'Pardon?' he asked.

She flushed. 'Nothing!' Great job,  _Raiku_ , she thought; way to ask personal questions about a (possibly?) former friend's body. Nice work.

Iwao made a noise low in his throat, a little sceptical, but didn't question it. Gratifyingly, now that he had his real skin back on, he also looked tired. And scorched, though Raiku would deny to her dying day that the black handprint smudged on his neck brought her any vindictive satisfaction.

They stood there for a moment in a silence that verged on awkward but didn't seem to want to commit.

'We'll be training every day until things improve,' he told her, gesturing vaguely; given how still he had been until that point, it was a little reassuring. A sign that maybe he felt a little of the uncertainty that she did. Also she had caught a glimpse of further paint on his palms, which was interesting. 'We can leave it for today and resume tomorrow.'

Raiku bit her lip. 'Is that okay? Usually Yamada wants us to train until he lets us go.'

Iwao didn't seem to understand the implications of displeasing Yamada, but he couldn't be blamed. 'I have taken the lead on pace. My endurance is also a factor.'

Suddenly paranoid, she gave him a quick scan. He didn't seemed more than lightly singed, but internal damage was always a risk with electrocution.

'Your electrical contact was less overwhelmingly aggressive towards the second half,' he continued. 'With more regular practice, moderation should happen naturally. Your energy seems to have settled more already.'

Raiku glanced down at her arms, then rubbed the skin of her upper arms self-consciously. 'It gets a bit… easier? When I've been using it a lot. It feels a bit more…'

"Appeased" wasn't the right word. "Satisfied" wouldn't make sense to him.

'Natural,' he guessed.

Raiku looked up in surprise. 'Sounds right!' she agreed quickly.

Iwao's gaze hadn't used to be so assessing, she thought, avoiding it then. 'It must be tiring,' he said, after a moment that stretched just past the point of comfort. 'Drawing it back constantly.'

Raiku's eyebrows shot up. 'We-ell,' she hedged, tugging a long piece of white hair, 'it's… easier when I don't have to.' Too ominous, her Gairano instincts warned immediately. The implication of obligation combined with destructive capability, just a hair over the line into Dramatic territory.

'I know,' Iwao said. When she just stared at him, baffled, he added, 'I saw. I remember.'

It took a second for her to make the connection, and when she did she felt a little embarrassed. Like he'd seen her naked instead of covered in ash and blood, years ago. But either way it was a basic state, and she had to admit it made her feel uncomfortably exposed. With short, shy Iwao, it hadn't felt as… something. But she didn't know what to do with this taller, dark-eyed young man who seemed to see so much, when he'd already seen more than she would have wanted.

Well… she knew one thing to do with him, but trying to fight him without murdering him didn't seem particularly social.

Her silence had gone on for too long. Iwao inclined his head and then turned away, a few steps down the path back into Konoha before she realised he was leaving.

'Hey, Iwao, wait!' Raiku jogged a few steps to draw even with him, then hesitated at the edge of what was a personal space bubble so defined she could practically see it. 'You're… staying with Yamada?' she asked lamely.

Iwao nodded.

She cleared her throat. 'And, uh. Is your team with you?' she asked, floundering for a topic. How the hell did someone catch up with a possibly estranged friend? Were they estranged? What were the criteria?

'Hijino and Akihito are waiting in the village to me to join them.'

Hito, hito—the other one had an eerily similar name, right? She snapped her fingers, 'Akihiro! Where's he? Is he coming later?'

Iwao tilted his head. 'I would be surprised.'

'…Why?' she asked, rubbing her neck. Things were bad between the twins, she remembered, but they'd still gone everywhere together as a team.

'He's dead.'

Oh. What could she even say to that?

'Oh.'

_Well done, Raiku._

'I'm sorry?' she offered, then cleared her throat. 'I'm sorry,' she said more certainly. 'That's terrible. Was it long ago?'

He shrugged. 'About a year ago. Maybe more. You'll see.'

Raiku blanched. 'I'll  _see_?'

Iwao nodded. 'By the way, Raiku,' he added. 'It's good to see you.'

And then he did it.

He winked at her. So effortlessly and naturally that for a second she was positive she had imagined it. He turned and resumed his walk, leaving her gaping behind him in the fading sunlight.

Raiku thumped her chest a few times to try and stop her heart from doing its hysterical dance. 'Iwao!' she rasped when she had air back. 'What the hell was that?!'

 

 

 

 

 

_Dear Gaara,_

_It was nice to hear from you! I hope you're doing well. Uzumaki Naruto told me that you had been hurt, but I'm sure you're recovering quickly. I hope Kankuro is not helping look after you. He was terrible. Not as a person! He was not reassuring when I was hurt? But I guess that it might be different if you are related! I'm sure he's taking great care of you, I'm sure everything is fine!_

_Well, I am going to go train, but. Write later! I will write later, I am not giving you instructions. I would never tell you what to do! Never! Please don't take it that way it just isn't how I operate but obviously you know that because we have met before in person wow I guess that was three years ago already I wonder if you're taller than me now but then again I am pretty tall ANYWAY_

_Bye!_

_Gairano Raiku_


	73. talk shit, get hit

Despite the unusually early end to training for the day, Raiku only had enough energy left to raid the pantry—no survivors—and slink up to bed before exhaustion took her legs out from under her. Physically, she wasn't worn down like she would have been from training with Kakashi or Yamada (which was to say, destroyed), but her brain was still moving sluggishly, dragging itself along through waves of tiredness. She could recognise the feeling it for what it was: the fatigue of resisting her own drive, the native assumption of violence she always carried with her, but it took her by surprise. It had never felt so hard to control before.

But then, she had to wonder how true that was; how hard she could have tried without knowing. If she'd ever, truly wanted to.

Hauling herself into the spare bedroom she was staying in, Raiku managed to change before she got under the covers before she collapsed into a heavy sleep, one arm still dangling off the bed.

It was the sleep of the dead for a while. The rest of the afternoon and evening passed without anything waking her. She was too tired to wake when her large family of hosts came home, but not enough that she didn't wake again in the middle of the night hours later, that now-familiar feeling leaving her alone in the dark to stare at the ceiling.

Every time. The dream had the same themes every time, just subtle differences in execution. Tsuji's face set in helpless frustration and  _god, you really are so alone,_ she murmured as the words drifted away again. She sighed and lifted a hand to rub her bleary eyes. It was heavy, she thought sleepily, to hold the only part left of someone. Tsuji was nowhere but her memory in the end; the world hadn't even left him his body. She thumped her head back once onto the pillow, shifting around until she felt comfortable again.

' _You're_  so alone,' she grumbled stubbornly, curling around that feeling Tsuji always left in her stomach—that dull ache, the emptiness of waiting for something that would never come. That missed-step lurch of knowing you were missing something.

After a while of lying there, trying to will her tired brain back to sleep and instead just finding the same unhelpful thoughts repeating—if she fell asleep  _right then_  she could still get four hours of sleep!—she gave up, sat up. She swung her legs off the side of the mattress and stood, vertebrae popping as she stretched out her back. Her eyes were already adjusted to the dark-blue dimness of the house at night and she slouched her way down the hallway without turning the lights on. She yawned and pushed a shock of heavy white hair out of her face on her way down the stairs, making a note that it was getting far too long. She was starting to look like Jiraiya; at least when the comparison was to Kakashi, it wasn't to the Alpha Pervert.

Then again, he wasn't without his own pitfalls.

Raiku found herself squinting into the darkened pantry with no idea of how she'd gotten there. God, she really needed to get out of her head more.

She snatched the lone foil packet of salt crackers she had managed to miss earlier and tucked them under her arm, casually sliding open the window and climbing out. She made her way up to the roof, feet bare against the cold brick, where she flopped down and ripped the packet open with her teeth. The night air was cooler on her skin already, a sign of the weather turning as summer inevitably wound down, and the lights of the village were laid out before her while the crickets chirped. Or the lights would have been, without the compound wall in between. But there was still a glow from the mild light pollution below, and it was peaceful. Raiku tried to enjoy it, but there was a nagging feeling in the back of her mind.

She peered into the packet of crackers, mouth already feeling dry. She should have brought water, she realised. Or tried to realise. Really she just observed; that wasn't the realisation that her brain was trying to bring forward and she should have known better than to try and pre-empt it by clever verb usage. Sighing again, she continued munching on the stolen crackers while her exhausted mind tried to summon up what the nagging feeling actually was.

It took some time. She was tired, after all, and not even half-awake on top of that. Raiku tilted her head back, breeze ruffling the overlong hair draping past her ears and trying valiantly to cool her superheated skin.

Wait.  _There_  it was, her brain suggested, finally dredging up the thought it had been so carefully constructing; right there.

There was a Device down by the compound gate.

Raiku raised her eyebrows and carefully folded the empty packet, sliding it into the baggy pockets of her pyjama pants. She stood and stretched again before ambling to the side of the roof and stepping off the edge. She landed lightly but bounced, a flash of light and the sharp crack of paving tile beneath her driving her to leap again to safety. She landed mid-pivot to see the tile still smoking faintly, cracked in half from the unexpected surge from her bare feet. She winced.

Mayuko was particularly meticulous about her garden. It was the only one in close proximity Raiku's house that had survived. That slip… would cost her as soon as Mayuko got home from night shift. She shook her foot out, sending it a silent reprimand. She had enough trouble with her hands sending out accidental power surges lately, but her feet? She trusted her feet to carry her places. This sort of behaviour just wasn't on, or she'd singlehandedly destroy every roof in Konoha. She tapped the ball of her foot on the ground cautiously to make sure there wouldn't be a second incident, waiting a split second before she set off again.

A couple members of her family were night owls—given how many of them there were, that was just statistics for you—but the houses she passed on her way to the gate were dark. Fortunately. She didn't want to explain why she was, by her standards, half-dressed and on her way out to the gate. God only knew what her father's reaction would be. It would likely involve hysterical accusations of boys, more hopeful queries about girls, and then heartfelt questions about why she hadn't felt able to confide about her night-time activities.

Raiku hopped over a small fence to take a shortcut, shaking her head in affectionate exasperation. Goddamnit, sometimes support networks were a hassle. When she finally reached the perpetually open gate, she took a moment to take a breath and scan. But she didn't really need to. It was exactly where she'd thought it was, which was worrying all on its own, but at least there was no uncertainty.

Again, there were no visual indicators. No distortions in the air or on the ground. No smell or sound. Just that feeling again, of something impossibly weighty, like a room with more space inside than the walls should have allowed.

She… hadn't actually thought this far ahead. Why the gate to the  _Gairano_  compound? It wasn't like it could nab any of her family. They didn't have Plots to distort and they weren't Characters to manipulate. With the notable, unfortunate exception of her mother, those were the only things Devices affected.

Oh god. Did she have any pregnant relatives? She quickly tried to recall, and of course she did. But no, no—her running about was likely a colossal headache for the Genematrix, so even if her status was deliberate she was unlikely to be the experiment that got repeated.

Just in case, she checked to make sure the slope was empty before addressing the issue. 'Go on.' After a moment of hesitation, she flapped a hand at it. 'Get out of here. Go away.' Another pause. 'Get!'

It did nothing and it went nowhere. She couldn't blame it really; that hadn't been her most intimidating delivery. She put her hands on her hips and tried that disapproving pose on for size. Then changed her mind and folded her arms. Shifted. Scowled magnificently and then realised it was all in her eyes because she wasn't used to having this much face to express with.

Still nothing.

She threw her hands up. 'What do you want?!'

It was at roughly this point, yelling at empty air in the middle of the night, as she stood barefoot on her compound steps, that she realised she was being ridiculous. It couldn't hear her, it didn't even have ears. But she knew it was there, so she'd, what—assumed that like any other mechanism a Gairano could perceive, she should be able to understand it better? Even the fact that she knew it was there was alarming, let alone any answers she could have gotten from it. Despite her father's easy acceptance of her sudden Device-sensing (really his curiosity), she shouldn't have been so blasé about it. She certainly shouldn't have gone anywhere near it, much less in her pyjamas.

Well no, on some level she felt put out because damnit, she should have had some perks! If she was going to be part of exactly what she'd conditioned her whole life to avoid, she should have gotten to boss the other parts around a little! Sure, she'd had worse encounters with unhelpful things in the past, but the Uchiha were long gone so the memory wasn't exactly fresh, and while she was on the topic, that was  _another_  thing—

A Device wasn't perceptible, but something made Raiku stop, her face somehow inches from where she knew it was.

Raiku blinked.

'Holy shit!' she yelped, lurching back. She must have drifted closer while she was lost in thought, caught in its strange gravity. How could she have gotten so close? She had no excuse! She  _knew_  what they did, she'd  _done_  that! When she'd come home, she'd dragged another Device into their kitchen, a passenger in her journey to confront her father. And then she'd almost gotten sucked into one that didn't even have a brain to trick her with?! Everyone knew that they played off each other; everyone! Stupid Device, stupid Raiku!

A sudden mental image of it struck her—being caught by some other Device, trapped inside it, helplessly dragged along to twist other people's lives. She shuddered and took another step back, just to be safe. Her back touched the gatepost, reassuringly solid. She glared into the empty air, hands coming up automatically to cover her exposed nose and mouth. She quickly realised and dropped them again, leaving her usually covered features feeling uncomfortably bare, nothing between them and the Device.

Damn… voyeuristic Device, she thought spitefully. She didn't have to deal with this; she would do what she should have done as soon as she confirmed it was there, which was to go and tell her dad. He was much more equipped to actually find out something useful. Raiku took a step back into the compound and paused. She could still feel it there, and the word occurred to her again out of nowhere.

Waiting.

Undoubtedly just her own paranoia but she still half-turned back towards it, some part of her having expected movement. Or something, anyway. The Device still sat at the compound gate. It hadn't moved, but then except for her dragging one that one time, she'd never seen one move. They just… appeared in places.

She glared at it for a long moment before cautiously turning to walk back.

So much for going back to sleep. But she would at least wake her dad up, and he  _hated_ that. The thought brought some spring to her step on the way back. Misery loved company, after all.

* * *

If Raiku had hoped that her recent poor timing with electrical accidents would die down, she quickly found herself mistaken. Whether it was bare minimum of sleep she was scraping by on, the Device encounter, or having to physically drag her father out of bed and almost braining herself on his bedside table after tripping on his blanket, she had no idea. It could have been any one of those very normal things. But she'd shocked her father twice since waking him, split the wood of Mayuko's kitchen table and absolutely  _destroyed_  a patch of tulips en route to the training grounds, so clearly optimism was for fools. But in her defence for one of those, who left their sprinkler on at… eight in the morning? Raiku had no idea when the correct time to water plants was, but she assumed that "when Raiku is nearby" wasn't it. She'd also hissed at her dad, she vaguely remembered. Like an angry cat, or Ryuu before noon.

Boy. She felt sorry for anyone who had to deal with Gairano Chitose today, because he would be  _cranky_.

Raiku reluctantly dragged herself up the grassy slope to the training ground they'd all agreed to meet at, looking forward at least to having some time to maybe nap in the sun before everyone else arrived. So it was fair to say she was startled to find two people already sitting in the wide, verdant field. Daisukenojo lifted his head and waved, sitting cross-legged next to a large black thermos and, perhaps more significantly, Iwao. Iwao nodded, broad hands wrapped around what was… as far as she could tell, a small cup like the one Daisukenojo was holding.

She stopped in her tracks. Daisukenojo was  _early_? And he'd brought something to drink with enough for  _everyone_? Usually he catered, at most, for himself and her. If he was feeling particularly brotherly. She rubbed two fingers together and flicked a quick zap through the air between them, satisfied when he didn't burst into a plume of smoke and instead just screamed girlishly.

He reeled it back but sent her a filthy look, made worse by the mild bruising around his eyes and throat. 'Good morning to you too, jerkface! Glad you're in a good mood!'

Raiku grinned, only a little meanly, and made her way over to them with her hands in her pockets. Daisukenojo, now verified as the real Daisukenojo, didn't have a lot of force behind the scowl. He must have been in a good mood already, so she felt safe to nudge his leg with her foot. 'What did you bring?'

He jerked his chin towards the thermos where it sat between him and Iwao. 'It's just tea. My house was crazy this morning, there were like five of me, so I decided to have it here. You can have some if you want.'

Raiku eyed him curiously while Iwao serenely sipped his tea, the older boy not even having the decency to look bleary-eyed like she knew she did. She recognised the cup he was holding as one of Daisukenojo's, which meant the red-haired deviant had brought a) enough tea for more than one person and b) enough cups to not have to share, both clearly proving premeditation for this little gathering. Was he hoping to soften Ryuu up? Tea had been known to do that if delivered with perfect timing. Or maybe he had tried to set another trap for an emotional talk? He did have the least dislike for them in the team.

She briefly considered letting it go. Briefly. 'Hey Iwao, was he here before you?'

Daisukenojo cleared his throat and continued before Iwao could respond. ' _And_  I knew Konishi was going to get here early since we bumped into each other last night, and Yamada lives right by me anyway. So we walked here together. I wanted to make sure he didn't get lost.'

Raiku hadn't spoken to Iwao in a long time, which she'd probably have to address at some point, but she somehow knew with certainty that he'd never been lost in his life. He also had the poker face to end them all, so she immediately discarded the thought of getting answers from him. She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully at Daisukenojo instead, who was looking at the sky the way he always did when he was avoiding something.

Curious.

Her train of thought was cut off by Ryuu brushing past, making a beeline for the thermos with his eyes half-closed.

'Good morning to you too, princess,' Daisukenojo said, tossing it to him before Ryuu could do something like kick him out of the way.

Ryuu made an irritated noise and sat. He reclined, really, against the nearby log, shamelessly hogging the thermos. Like Daisukenojo, he'd clearly taken a few hits during their training session, though the long cut down one cheekbone had obviously been expertly tended to. He was also moving a little stiffly, which Raiku easily chalked up to Daisukenojo doing what all three of them tended to: punching his opponent in the spine.

They had a few minutes to settle in before Daisukenojo finished his tea and started putting it back into his bag. 'Heads up, Yamada's coming.' Ryuu put up a brief fight for the thermos, which he seemed to mostly want for the warmth; Raiku tried so hard not to make the lizard-warmth-basking comparison in her mind, but come on! Ryuu, like  _dragon_? And he  _was_  basking on the log, really—

'They rely on your chakra abilities,' Iwao said to Daisuke, handing over his mug.

Daisuke shrugged. The tops of his ears went pink, like they always did when someone implied he was good at things; he put on a good front, but she did have to remember that he was a self-conscious young man. 'They've both got things that do something sort of like it.'

Raiku nodded, the familiar taste of metal at the back of her mouth settling in when she focused on each of them to find the conductors there. Ryuu had far more than she would ever have guessed in such simple, close-fitting clothes, while Iwao had… none. At all. Daisuke had what she was pretty sure were brass knuckles in his pocket, just based on how well she knew him.

Yamada, approaching up the hill, had tiny spots of metal on him that she was pretty sure were surgical staples. Lurching to her feet, she brushed off the back of her pant legs. 'Ten ryo says he's still in scrubs,' she said cheerfully. Daisukenojo clapped her hand and used it to pull himself up, grinning.

'Deal.'

 

 

 

 

 

Iwao was not, upon further consideration, as kind a sparring partner as Raiku had been led to believe. By him. And his obviously misleadingly kind demeanour.

Several days into their new arrangement, she had actually decided that he was a monster, determined to provoke her into murdering him at every turn. Yamada hadn't needed to intervene as dramatically as he had on their first day but her tendency to try and force Iwao from the ground, where he was safely earthed, was still a problem. As much as she tried to avoid it, her subconscious predilections would prompt her to take the most damaging approach every time, and it was only Iwao's superior experience and honed reflexes that kept him from permanent nerve damage. Or worse. But he was amiable about it and gave clear, helpful feedback, exactly like a good sparring partner would.

It was hell. His apparent equanimity largely removed the guilt that ordinarily prompted her to try and hold back. Raiku had decided to buy herself a whole cake if he survived the week, and her odds weren't looking good. She went home every day and collapsed into an exhausted, highly-strung mess, and the occasional electrical accidents outside of training had become more regular without her mind fully on top of controlling them. Not that she ever seemed to have much warning anyway.

Worse yet, Ryuu and Daisukenojo had totally failed to similarly endanger each others' lives.

In the sessions themselves she wasn't hurting Iwao as often, had left burns along his arms and shoulders less and less. ...Well, less accidentally, anyway. By Yamada's standards it was safe to say that the training was going swimmingly.

For a given value of the word.

Raiku blocked a blow that still shoved her backwards and lashed out, a broad, sizzling wave of electricity following her hand. Iwao absorbed it without flinching, the seams of the stone heating red for a moment before he aimed a kick squarely at her ribs. She ducked backwards rather than trying to block again, sinking into a crouch to lash out with a low kick of her own. Iwao ducked back and she felt a thrill of glee at the sight of him forced to withdraw, his planted feet as always, the enemy. If she could knock him back then she could knock him  _down_ , sink electricity through the stone to find something that would  _burn_ —

Raiku caught her glowing fist before she could send it forward with too much charge yet again, arresting the motion with a sickening lurch that sent her balance all wrong. Iwao had already ducked in before she could correct it and she tried to bring up her guard instead, to buy her time to gain distance.

She knew immediately that she'd judged the angle wrong in the hastiness of the block, in her hurry to defend instead of lashing out with deadly force. Iwao's leg smacked her arm out of the way, too far past her guard already. He had a brutal strike with the stone guard up. She knew that already. It made her bones shake each time she blocked.

So her unprotected leg never stood a chance, really.

The blow crashed into her thigh, hard. Raiku howled and went down, clutching at it. Iwao immediately dropped out of his defensive stance and into a crouch at her side.

'Did you hear a crunch?!' Raiku demanded frantically, holding her leg so hard her knuckles were going white, flesh throbbing painfully underneath it. 'I think I heard a crunch!'

'I didn't hear a crunch,' he said evenly, trying to see around her bare hands without actually touching them. 'Let me see.'

Raiku tried to loosen her fingers, but another wave of pain made her clamp down again.

Iwao settled back on his heels. 'I'm getting the medic,' he said, stone dissipating into his skin.

Raiku nodded. Then tensed, digging her fingers into her own injury. 'No! Do  _not_  get Ryuu!'

He stood. 'You need help.'

'It's fine! It's probably fine! It already hurts less!' she said desperately, but couldn't quite pry her hands away from her thigh. Iwao let out a long breath as he looked down at her, then gently nudged her leg with his foot.

' _I'll_   _ **kill you**_ _!_ '

Iwao nodded. 'I'm getting him. Wait here.'

Raiku, teeth still bared in a pained snarl, watched him walk briskly off, then tried to struggle back to standing. The resulting surge of agony left her gasping and lying on her back, staring at the sky.

Catching her breath, she waited for the pain-induced dizziness to fade.

Right then.

She had a choice. She could wait for Ryuu, or hope that another medic came along. With her luck it would likely be Sakura.

 _Or_  she could resort to a different, much less responsible plan, that would hopefully still be less traumatising.

Reaching into her pocket—gingerly, trying so carefully not to jostle her leg—she fished out a tiny black soldier pill, tossing it into her mouth and crunching it between her back molars. The harsh bitterness spread over the back of her tongue a split second before a rush of heat followed, surging down her spine and pooling in her stomach. She let out a sigh and closed her eyes, her hands and feet starting to tingle. After a minute the pain in her leg started to feel more like white noise, a buzzing static when she shifted it replacing the agony. Raiku lurched up into a sitting position, blinking. The upwards movement made her eyes feel like they were floating. She awkwardly struggled up onto her feet, swaying for a moment when the blood seemed to rush to her head. The combination of adrenaline and stimulants terrifyingly like amphetamines swum hot through her body, making her fingers twitch; it was a reaction of some kind but not the one she should have had, not with the electricity devouring all the extra fuel. It left her not so much overwhelmed as innervated, but it put a happy layer of chemicals between her and the pain and made her feel tingly and pleasant.

She listed to the side and lifted her arms to give her more balance, a jolt of electricity shooting out to rocket off through the trees. She blinked at her hand, deciding one pill would be enough. 'I cannot believe we give these to children,' she muttered, tongue feeling fuzzy and woollen in her mouth, eyes stretched wide so she could focus.

It took a few false starts for her to work out the angle she needed to step to make her leg weight-bear, and then she made her lopsided way through the trees separating the training ground from Konoha. She picked her way through with the exaggerated care of the drunk or concussed, the trampled grass providing a trail over and around tree roots.

Raiku came to a stop at the bridge that would lead into the village outskirts, leaning heavily on the railing. The river rushed below, the smell of freshwater and greenery reaching her nose while the white-noise thrum of energy stretched towards her skin in interest.

She stepped forward.

Or almost did, before she stepped back instead, the static clearing in her skin enough for it to prickle in anticipation before her foot could land, before that feeling of Gairano-wrong and Plot-right could settle in, and her day suddenly made perfect sense.

'Please,' she begged, closing her eyes. 'Let's not do this today.'

She wanted so badly to step forward, and it had less to do with reaching the hospital and more to do with that sense at the back of her mind that was insisting she do exactly that.

Raiku stepped forward.

But no she  _didn't_ , and she gritted her teeth against the sense that she was going to, that she already had, that she just had to take a step and it would be fine. She swayed back again, gripping the railing tight to keep her balance.

'I get it,' she forced out. 'I should be doing something, right?'

The Device on the bridge between her and the village sat and told her nothing. But what else was new? The silence was so heavy between them that it almost felt somehow visible. Like the absence of noise left it so empty that it was collapsing in on itself.

'Is it the hospital?' she tried. 'There's always a Character there. That's what you want? You want me to… go near them or something?'

No, not that word, damnit. Not that it could  _want_  things from her, expect things, not that it could sit there patiently in wait for her. She repeated it mentally over and over, trying to reassert it as a meaningless Genematrix function in her mind, something she'd be foolish to anthropomorphise just because she was something like it once.

She shook her head, mostly at herself, then pushed off the railing and wobbled back into standing up straight. She'd have to go for the other bridge, for all that it was much further away. Stupid Devices on their stupid bridges—

Intellectually she knew that Naruto was also using the training grounds. That it would be there waiting for him, or for Kakashi, or for whatever Character they had dragged into their mess. But it couldn't help but feel personal, now that she'd noticed it. Like they were being pulled towards each other, to get… whatever the Genematrix needed done together. But if her dad was right, they both just needed to touch the same Characters in some way. They didn't need to be  _together_ , Devices were never  _together_. She'd held one to her once so it had to be possible, but it wasn't what happened on its own. It was because she was moving when she wasn't supposed to, she could just feel it. Like Devices could fall towards each other if they got too close, caught in the pull of gravity intensified into a single, unspeakably heavy point.

She managed to catch herself before she could fall backwards and complete her own tired metaphor, the dull ringing in her ears making way for,

'It isn't what we do.'

Raiku's head had jerked back towards the Device before she registered she'd moved, before the words fully sunk in. Her lips parted in shock, eyes wide and searching.

Nothing. Nothing but the emptiness, and the ghost of Tsuji's voice. Clear as if he were standing there, but just pulled from thin air. The sound of running water was all she could hear.

But she'd heard something. She  _had_. That empty air had made way for words that it could pull out of her memory, could use to pull her towards it.

The space between them suddenly seemed like it was seething; like the patience she had projected before was gone, stripped back and filled with something angry seeping out of her own skin.

'I don't know if you're the same one as before,' she growled. 'I don't know if you're the same, if you're—if you're following me, or some stupid Plot needs us to do something together, but this isn't going to work.' She made a cutting motion with her hand. 'I'm not doing this… weird shit with you! With any of you! I haven't done it before and things were fine anyway, so just… get lost!' She turned again, determination cutting through some of the haze of drugs and the returning pain.

Something slammed hard into her back, knocking the wind out of her and sending her off her feet to sprawl on the pavestones. Raiku groaned and coughed, trying to gasp some air back into her lungs. She pulled herself into rolling onto her front, pushing herself up with her hands until she could drag her legs back under her. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe steadily through the reflexive surge of rage, that indignant rush that followed an insult, a slap, a snide comment that stung.

'Really?' she asked when she could push the words past the anger gripping her throat. ' _Really_?'

She was saved from screaming at empty space by someone clearing their throat from in front of her. She looked forward, half-expecting there to be no one there again, but there were feet in front of her. She slowly traced them with her eyes, up a long set of legs to tanned arms, folded across a lean chest, and then finally meeting bright yellow eyes narrowed menacingly.

Ryuu unfolded his arms to toss a syringe ampule up and down in his hand. 'Where do you think you're going?' he asked sweetly. 'There's healing to be done.'

Raiku wondered wearily if it wasn't too late to choose the Device instead.


	74. hi transverse facture, I'm dad

'Well,' her father said when he entered her room, 'the good news is that the Device isn't Traumatic Backstory.'

He smiled when Raiku just sighed in relief. Traumatic Backstory had sat on Hokage Mountain for years before Raiku had been born, and lingered a few years after. It had brooded invisibly and implacably over the village, churning out parental deaths and lost lovers and abandonment issues until it had eventually moved on, leaving no Character within reach with a Drama Ranking of Two or below. The Gairano still twitched if they got too near where it had carved a groove in the village history.

God, Traumatic Backstory was the worst.

'How's the leg?' he asked, stepping more fully into her room.

Raiku folded her arms across her chest and scowled at him, aforementioned strapped leg stretched out in front of her on her bed.

He huffed. 'Don't give me that, it was barely broken.'

'That isn't what "transverse fracture" means. You've been around Characters too much,' Raiku muttered sullenly.

He ignored that pretty devastating jab and continued. 'They've just said you should take it easy for a few days, you don't even have to stay off it completely. Count yourself lucky.'

Raiku flicked her fingers irritably. 'What's the point of our whole village doing this healing overhaul and going all chakra-healing-crazy if, once they've helped you, you're  _still_  not completely fixed?!'

He sat down on the bed by her leg and patted her arm. 'It  _is_  completely fixed, they just don't want you to reinjure it while the bone at the fracture site is newly healed. It's hardly going to slow you down.'

Raiku continued to glare.

He ignored it, undoubtedly because he knew he'd be intimidated if he looked too closely at her withering gaze. 'Anyway. I came to let you know that the Device is there for Naruto, that much is clear,' he resumed, as if he'd never left the topic to begin with. 'It's got a main Narrative Arc travelling through there at some time in the near future, so you were right on that front.'

Raiku reluctantly let some of the scowl fade from her face in favour of relief. The nebulous dread that had struck her, that strange idea that it was there for her, shrunk just enough. 'Any idea what it is?'

He father shot her a side-on look. 'No. I can rule some of the more obvious ones out but I can't positively identify it for sure until it interacts with Plot in some way. Maybe not even then, since I won't know when it moves on.'

They remained there, looking at each other for a long moment, Raiku feeling tenser and tenser under his assessing gaze, more and more irritated for her lack of mask.

'I can't tell what it is either!' she snapped when it finally got to be too much. 'I just knew it was there!'

He raised his hands innocently. 'Didn't think you could! Or if you could, I know you'd tell me.'

'Then what's with the face?!'

'I'm not making a face!'

Raiku leaned forward and jabbed one gloved finger into his cheek. ' _That_  face, the one you give me whenever you're trying to decide if I'm in trouble or not!'

He batted her hand away. 'So first of all, you're always in trouble, it is quite literally part of your composition. And second,' he continued while she squawked in outrage, 'I'm  _trying_  to think about this situation.' He poked her back soundly in the cheek through her mask, following her as she leaned away. ' _Raiku_.'

Raiku snapped her teeth threateningly and leered when he hastily withdrew his hand. 'So. Should I try and find others? Would that make it easier to tell which one is which?' she asked, settling smugly back into place. 'Is that useful?'

He tilted his head back and sighed, more heavily than she felt the situation warranted. 'As this stage,' he said, 'I'm not sure it's a matter of "trying."'

Raiku frowned. 'Rude.'

He shook his head. 'No, that's not what I mean. Devices aren't supposed to move, per se. They just appear when needed.'

She nodded warily. 'Yeah…'

He shifted to face her more directly and gestured. 'But you've been adjacent to a fair few Plot developments in your life that are central to themes of Destruction, even when you've tried your hardest not to be. So we can logically assume that the Genematrix is compensating for your movements. We've talked about that before.' After a glance at her to make sure she was following, he kept going. 'But things are getting more serious, faster than I anticipated. I thought it would be as simple as you just ignoring the more obvious Genematrix interventions, but with larger events to orchestrate, I think it's finding that your scurrying around is harder to manage. But basic narrative structure suggests that it  _does_  have to try to manage you. Device-you, that is, not… Raiku-you.'

Raiku jerked back. 'What?!'

He patted her knee quickly, a perfunctory gesture of comfort. 'There's just the one of Device-you, we knew this. The thing I've been working on, that's more—'

'It's news to me that I'm—what, a management priority!' she said shrilly. 'To the  _Genematrix_ —oh god. I'm gonna throw up'

'You're not going to throw up,' he said patiently over her gagging noises. 'This is fine, everything is okay.'

'It is  _so_  not fine,' Raiku croaked, leaning over the edge of the bed and dragging her wastebasket towards her. Another wave of nausea made her retch loudly.

'Raiku, I know this is hard,' he said soothingly, patting her back since she was apparently committed to being horrified. 'But we've got to most past the obvious if we're going to plan around this. You can do this!' He paused. 'I mean, if you think about it,' he said with a snicker, 'we're  _destroying_  our preconceptions.'

Raiku paused mid-retch, then slowly lifted her head to glare at him over her shoulder.

He beamed at her, but only for a second.

 

 

'Let's try this again,' her father said, patting down his singed vest. The edges of his hair still smoked faintly from where he was now safely sitting on the other side of the room, with her desk, bin and chest of drawers hurriedly dragged between them. 'Now that we've gotten that out of our systems. Wait, honey; that didn't hurt your leg, did it?' He craned his neck to see over the makeshift defensive wall.

Raiku squirmed and growled at him from where he'd forcibly swaddled her in two layers of blankets, her arms bound to her sides.

He settled back. 'Moving on. We know that Devices sometimes group together at points of high Plot density, just for efficiency. Many Plots, but nowhere near as many Devices… it just ends up that way for resourcing reasons. And some match together thematically and stick to each other for periods of time. Like…' He snapped his fingers. 'Romantic Intrigue and Amnesia!'

They both winced.

'That was a bad few months for us.'

'Really bad.'

'Do you remember the…?'

'We all remember "the,"' she said, voice bleak.

He grimaced. 'Less than ideal. Oh, a more relevant example would be Traumatic Backstory and Familial Tension. That's what would have nabbed your teammate, what's-his-name.'

Raiku rolled her eyes for the thousandth time on this very exchange. 'His name is Ryuu, Dad. You're past plausible deniability at this point.'

'Right, his name's not important,' he agreed easily. 'But that combination is very common here. Traumatic Backstory-And-Basically-Anything is very common for shinobi, really.'

Raiku raised a hand. 'Wait, does that apply to us? With… my mother, and all.'

Chitose rubbed his forehead. 'Not really, we've talked about it before. People die every day. It's the impact moving forward that determines Plot significance. We took the loss, grieved, and moved on, like people do. It's not a defining element of our lives or identities and our futures don't revolve around it. Just like how each occurrence of Destruction doesn't require your influence. It comes down to…' He waved a hand vaguely. 'Weight.'

Raiku managed to drag her arms out of the blankets and braced herself on the desk to lean closer to him in her eagerness. 'Yes! That's how I was thinking of it, like weight, or, or gravity!' she exclaimed. 'Nailed it!'

He shot her a wry look. 'I'm flying blind here and I might be wrong, so dial back on the confirmation bias.'

She shifted her weight to one hand, freeing the other to make a hurrying motion. 'But cut to the point. Should I be going near them or not?'

He shrugged helplessly.

Raiku slumped down onto the desk. 'Dad!'

'Well!' he said defensively. 'This is new to me as well, I have no idea! I don't think you're doing it as consciously as you seem to think you are. That's my only conclusion so far.'

'What does  _that_  mean?!' she groaned, pressing her face into the desk's surface.

He reached awkwardly around the dresser to pat her head. 'Things get complicated when Devices get too close to each other, and the more there are in one spot, the more that appear. Like the Chuunin Exams, that whole mess.' He made a gesture as close to frustrated as she'd ever heard him. 'I don't know yet. I can't be sure if that's just because they need to be there to deal with major Plot and it's  _convenient_  to have them in the same spot, or if they get pulled towards each other more and more the higher the Plot density is. I can't tell which way around things are. So for now, it means that you should be careful. Stay away if you can, in case it's attracting you.'

'That's so incredibly unhelpful! And vague! And everything that Tsunade thinks you are in general, Dad!'

He made a low wounded noise. 'Raiku, how could you?'

'Well! You have to admit, it's not the best advice! You even said before that I shouldn't run away from Characters so much but not not at  _all_ , now I have a whole other set of vague instructions?'

'One instruction.' Another pat to the head. 'You can do it. You've been doing well so far, anyway. Trapped into lunch with multiple Characters and not a Plot on you afterwards! I was so proud.'

She pouted, turning her head to the side and scratching a nail along the wood grain of the desk. 'I was hoping you'd have figured it out by now,' she muttered. 'You always know everything about this stuff.'

'I'll get there,' he said mildly; as if it were something simple, just a facet of Gairano life that generations before him had failed to fully grasp, now set out before him with nothing to navigate with but her defective instincts and their combined Gairano abilities. 'But it's a process and we're going to have to be patient and not rush into anything.'

Raiku sighed. 'I'm really bad at that,' she said, like she was admitting something. 'Yamada says "quick" and "gratuitously violent" are my strengths.'

'Well,' he began, voice dropping into something sly. 'We'll see about … the  _destruction_  of that  _vice_.'

That was a lot to process. That was a lot for her to get through, to struggle through as a sentence. When she finally lifted her head to glare at him, he was already beating a hasty retreat.

'I'll see you later, sweetheart, sleep well!'

'It is  _five o'clock!_ ' she yelled at his retreating back; when he hastily flicked the light switch off, the room was still well-lit by the light from the open window outside. Despite that, she still settled back on her bed with a grumble, folding her arms. She eyeballed her furniture and sighed, then looked down at her strapped leg. 'How the hell am I going to move all this back by myself?'

 

 

 

 

 

The main issue with falling asleep at five in the afternoon, other than the fact she hadn't meant to obey her fleeing father, was that she woke at four the next morning and couldn't go back to sleep.

Raiku stared at the dark ceiling, breathed in the cool, still air for a moment and then rolled out of bed with an undignified  _thud_. Springing up to her feet, she made for her closet to change, because she'd be  _damned_  if she got dragged into another night-time Expository event. Or worse, tried to go back to sleep—Tsuji's black, hurt gaze wasn't going to visit her while she had anything to say about it, not on her watch! With her graceless fall out of bed and the subsequent awkward onomatopoeia she'd capped it off with, she had a good feeling about holding that off.

She dressed and slipped outside into the courtyard, rolling her neck and cracking the knuckles of her fingers and ignoring the shattering of a nearby potted plant when this went horribly electrically awry. Because this was going to go fine! She was going to have a low-key day, maybe see some cousins, ignore her currently uncontrollable electrical outbursts, and eventually go back to training. In three to five days, pending re-injury, and as long as she used alternating heat and ice at the site for two hours every night if there was any lingering discomfort and reported any abnormal swelling or pain,  _thank you Mayuko yes she understood no she didn't need to repeat it_.

Raiku shook her head and set off out of the compound.

The streets sat silent except for the few people up at the same time she was; someone she recognised as the owner of the nearby bakery, slightly bleary-eyed and bundled up against the pre-dawn chill, was making his way away with his back to her. She'd been a morning person on and off her whole life, but this was early even for her. Nothing was open, her friends wouldn't appreciate being woken up so soon, and Yamada was probably either training on his own or doing… whatever it was he did at home.

She wanted to guess "sleeping," but that didn't feel like him.

She tapped the toes of one foot against the path, sort of detracting from the peaceful ambience.

And it was then, at that very moment, that Raiku realised something that all other teenagers had come to know instinctively long before her.

"Alone" actually meant "unsupervised."

Her sudden twitch struck a nearby light pole with an ominous crackling sound, but she ignored it in favour of the sudden thrill of this new information.

Her dad was asleep. Yamada was elsewhere. Iwao was—wait, Iwao was not her boss! Damnit, Raiku! But even then, he was leaving her alone while she was meant to take it easy. Kakashi was swept up in the Main Plot, so god knew if she'd ever even see him again, or if he'd even remember her with the new Drama taking over his mind and Characterisation.

For a moment, she was startled to find herself feeling a pang of sadness. She quickly shook it off. Anyway. The point was that the people who usually policed her behaviour, weren't, or couldn't. She could do whatever she wanted!

Raiku stretched her arms above her head languidly. No one jabbed her in the side or pushed her over. She enjoyed it thoroughly for a whole five seconds, then did a two-step jump off the nearby wall and took to the rooftops.

She spent the better part of the morning perched on various ledges, taking to her new people-watching hobby with enthusiasm. The civilians of Konoha were largely used to their kind of birds-eye surveillance and tolerated her effortlessly, opening stores and sending kids to school in little stumbling armies along the street. She strolled down a phone line just to send the pigeons scrambling, swung past Ryuu's window to pull faces at him while he pointedly ignored her and got ready for training. Without talking to anyone in hours, Raiku found herself laughing more than she had in what felt like months.

After a while, she'd built up enough good cheer that just naturally, she should have known it would have to balance itself.

She was jumping from a store's overhang to a suburban roof when she caught sight of a familiar figure and lifted an arm to wave, halfway through calling out Iwao's name before she registered the two strangers behind him and cut herself off with a squawk to duck behind a nearby chimney stack and hide.

She pressed her back to it. His team! How had she forgotten that they were in Konoha as well?! God, she'd almost put herself in a position to interact with strangers. On her day off, no less. She could only hope, against all odds, that they hadn't seen her before she ducked away.

After a moment to collect herself, she peered out at the group again to take a better look.

Hijino had been distinct from other Jounin and was immediately recognisable to her even years later, crouched behind the chimney stack just like she had been then.

Also injured like she had been then, she realised irritably.

His hair was still long and pale, a more age-appropriate platinum blond rather than bone-white like hers. It was tied back into a high ponytail that still fell past his shoulders and it looked improbably silky for someone from such an arid, harsh climate.

Raiku had never trusted Hijino's hair and it looked like her instincts had been dead-on. No one harmless had hair that soft.

Brooding, she let her eyes trace down. For a second she thought that he was wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved shirt like her own, sans mask, but after a few seconds of squinting and pointedly ignoring how bright his smile was, she realised she was wrong. The skin of his collarbone and what she could see of his arms was tattooed with thickly lined geometric patterns, such a solid, inky black that her own skin itched in sympathy. She was too far to make out the details but it seemed symmetrical from his vertical axis, spreading up the sides of his neck evenly, mirrored on his exposed forearms.

Raiku cocked her head to the side. He hadn't had those before, had he? Also, how was he did he have such a mild tan? She could understand that from a purely Character-driven point of view, it made sense. It made his hair and skin contrast better with the tattoos. But how was that contextually justifiable? Did he have to use sunscreen every thirty minutes back home?

She sighed and shook her head. There was no point wondering about things like that, but every now and again it was irresistible. Moving on. She skimmed over the now-familiar sight of Iwao, the tense line of his shoulders, to the third figure.

Well… It had to be Akihito. It just had to be, but nothing about him but his proximity to Hijino and Iwao told her that. Visually, at least. He'd certainly never looked cheerful, but there were heavy bags under his eyes and he was whipcord lean, verging into dangerously thin. His hair was only slightly longer than Iwao's and dark, while pale, mottled scarring edged from where his shoulder was covered by shirt, stretching up to border his ear. He wore thin leather gloves that were plain and well worn, but nothing out of the ordinary otherwise. Plain, serviceable clothes, a weapons pouch on his hip. It didn't make sense for a moment, how surprised she was by his appearance, but she supposed it was likely because he wasn't as handsome as she'd thought he was going to be. At one stage he'd reminded her faintly of Ryuu and sure, some people might be into the whole "brooding serial killer with consumption" thing he had going on, but she wasn't used to the Genematrix changing its approach mid-development.

They'd clearly spotted her so Raiku didn't bother to hide her blatant appraisal of Iwao's teammates, mostly because she had learnt her lesson about trying to spy on Jounin. In a non-professional setting, anyway. When Hijino looked up, shading his eyes with his hand and waved, she just waved back.

No point in delaying the inevitable, she reflected.

Hijino's smile was terrifyingly bright. Raiku took a second to feel indignant, truly  _indignant_  at how much time the Genematrix required people to spend on taking in the stupidly complex details of shinobi's appearances. Really? Half of the adjectives it forced on her, she would never have to use in any other context. This was hardly the sort of thing she would need to focus on if she was dealing with normal people. Like Yamada—his appearance was straightforward and purely reflective of his function. And also a slap to the face of biology, given his size, but still. It certainly didn't do anything stupid like draw attention to how  _special_  he was.

Hijino made a beckoning gesture when she continued feeling sullen rather than jumping down towards them. She could make out thin black lines along the edges of long fingers.

She shook her head and shrank back.

It looked too much like Plot.

It looked too much like Plot trapped or slinking over his skin, brought back trapped yellow eyes and that hot, claustrophobic feeling of helplessness.

Iwao half-turned towards her and frowned. He gestured towards his leg and then at her. She changed the wave to a quick flapping motion, brushing him off. He lifted his hand again, then stopped, turning quickly to face Akihito.

Raiku started to shift backwards, but stopped when she bumped up against something. She spun around, skidding a few steps back on the tiles.

Akihito looked down at her blankly, head tilted at a curious angle. She bit the inside of her cheek hard, refusing to give him the satisfaction of jumping. Trying to scare her? He was deluded if he thought she hadn't been thoroughly trained out of making a scene by that anymore. Mostly. Very nearly entirely, and certainly not on her day off.

'Seriously?' she asked, instead of slapping his stupidly impassive, creepy face. 'Seriously, man?' This was some Genin bullshit right here, she thought, and with a huff she turned to shoot Iwao a frankly lethal glare.

He was already looking away. Jaw set, staring down Akihito where he still stood next to him.

The presence behind Raiku—she cast her mind to it instinctively, felt for it with her pathetic chakra instincts as well for good measure.

Nothing.

But  _really_  nothing. No metal, no chakra, not even the dull, muffled press of water in a body. Just the teeth-grinding pressure of dense carbon.

She heard a faint, dull click from behind her.

Raiku looked up at the sky and considered her options. She  _should_  turn around and investigate, she knew. God only knew what was going on. But… also…

Also, it was her day off. Mysterious clicks, creepy teammates, and attractive people were problems she had to deal with at  _work_. Raiku was too worldly and mature to let the whine behind her teeth escape, but her breath did come out as a hiss. She cast a quick, reluctant look over her shoulder.

Akihito—or whatever it was—regarded her with his blank, dark eyes.

'Nope,' she enunciated clearly, slowly. 'Nope.' She turned and started carefully making her way over the roof tiles, mindful of her injured leg. 'Nope!' She kept up her determined chant all the way through her descent to street level, giving escape a token attempt only to find the road blocked by not-quite-Akihito.

That, she thought, was a little  _too_  clear.

So.

'Hey guys!' she said, turning on her heel and walking towards the Sand team like it had been her plan all along. 'How are we all doing today?'

Iwao risked enough of a facial expression to shoot her a mildly apologetic look, and she made a note to hurt him for it later. No "faint" anything was going to make up for this little ambush, and it was frankly insulting that he was even trying.

Hijino just smiled at her. His teeth were very white, she noted glumly. 'Gairano!' He greeted, hands almost ostentatiously relaxed down at his sides. Look at me, his bare palms said; look how harmless we are. 'It's been a while. Though I don't think we ever formally met?' he added, shooting her a look that she had no choice but to professionally admire. It was warm, and conspiratory, and seemed so sincerely affectionate that with a chilling rush, she suddenly knew exactly what kind of shinobi Hijino was. She shifted just an inch away. His smile got incrementally wider.

Iwao took the hint. 'Hijino Itsuki, Gairano Raiku.'

Raiku bowed her head quickly as Hijino did the same. 'Itsuki like… One Happiness?' she asked, sketching the name characters in the air with her finger. Hopefully. Because that was a common name with that boring spelling of it. Something harmless and able to take him down a Rank or two.

He shook his head, doing the same more decisively but with different letters. The tattoos were vaguely dizzying up close, layers and layers of perfectly drawn lines and inky swathes. 'Like "Go My Way" or "My Way Only,"' he corrected.

Of course it was.

'But more importantly, look at you!' he said cheerfully. 'You've grown up a lot. Hasn't she, Akihito?'

Raiku looked at the other boy reluctantly, meeting the gaze she had felt boring into her since the awful doppelganger showed up.

But all Akihito said was, 'She grew… taller.' It didn't feel like a compliment.

Hijino laughed, which Raiku was starting to suspect he did often. 'Yeah, must be convenient for identifying insecure boys. Nothing gives them away like their fear of women being taller than them.'

Raiku shifted her weight from foot to foot. 'I mean… it hasn't really come up? As an issue, I mean.'

Hijino looked away from a suddenly sullen Akihito to her—up at her, she noticed, she was almost an inch taller than him—and gestured at his arms, at the dizzying, spiralling patterns there. 'You're lucky. I had to resort to these to intimidate people. Being as tall as you would have saved me a lot of time under chisel and ink.' His eyes creased at the corners when he smiled. He was probably three seconds away from winking.

To her dismay, Raiku realised she was only about two seconds more away from being reluctantly charmed anyway.

Fortunately for her dignity, but less so for her peace of mind, there was another low clicking noise. Raiku tensed.

She felt Iwao shift closer to her side. 'Akihito. Stop,' her said, tone sharp.

'Is that…?' Raiku asked faintly, unable to finish the sentence. It stuck in her throat like the words had shrivelled there, leaving her mouth dry. She reluctantly turned, looking past the reassuring shield of Iwao's shoulder. The second Akihito tilted his head to the side as it stood there facing her. She heard that faint click again, like ceramic tiles coming gently together.

'You remember Akihiro,' Akihito said.

Raiku didn't want to turn her head, like the movement would set him off. But her eyes drifted to the side to look helplessly at Iwao.

Iwao wasn't someone who glared. But there was something like anger in the way he was looking at Akihito, something hard and flinty. 'This is his puppet,' he said, voice flat of affect and totally unhelpful in informing Raiku's response. 'He named it after his brother.'

'It used to be my brother,' Akihito corrected.

Raiku could feel that her face was frozen into a grim rictus of horror, but couldn't seem to shift it. 'Ohhhh,' she echoed, noise distorted by the weird shape her mouth was pulled into. No mask was going to cover up this expression. Her whole body was broadcasting disgust.

A slow smile spread across Akihito's face, thin-lipped and satisfied.

Raiku could feel the shudder building again, but she couldn't. She couldn't let him see how bad it was. If he got even an inkling of how intense her horror was, he'd see it as a weakness and exploit it every chance he got. If she could just pass this off as an initial bad reaction, she could fake it the rest of the time. She could act! Her whole job revolved around lies and violence.

But she couldn't make herself look at the puppet again, so she was relieved when someone else broke the silence.

Iwao took her elbow lightly. Mercifully. 'Raiku,' he said. 'Your leg.'

Raiku blinked at them, then looked down at her own leg. 'Oh. Oh! It's still hurting a bit,' she offered, her mouth apparently taking the out a moment before her brain kicked in. 'I'm meant to be resting, I should go. And sit!' she said, looking at him then unable to stop herself from glancing at the puppet. 'Sit down. Because my leg is hurt,' she added unnecessarily, to the puppet, before physically turning her whole body away so she would stop fixating on its blank eyes.

'I am going to meet Hatori,' he told her. 'Come?'

Raiku nodded quickly. 'Yes! Definitely! Of course.'

Hijino laughed again, but he waved them off. 'Of course. I'll see you around, yeah?'

'Yeah,' Raiku said, incredibly unconvincingly. There was no Plot on him, but Hijino screamed Narrative potential. She'd have to tell Mayuko there was a troublingly attractive man floating around, roughly her age. In an ostensibly caring profession, rogue shinobi with beautiful hair were one of the great banes of Mayuko's existence. Raiku knew this for a fact. Mayuko had shown her the list. Waiting for doctor's instructions was up there, as well as a scribbled-out blur that looked suspiciously like it ended with "-se." 'I'll see you,' she added lamely.

Hijino reached out and pinched Akihito's ear hard, still smiling.

'Bye,' Akihito said flatly, still dead-eyed but leering.

Iwao steered her lightly up the road. She had the patience to wait until they rounded the corner and got out of sight before she smacked Iwao quickly and repeatedly in the shoulder. 'You couldn't have helped me out, you bastard?!'

Iwao, smart young man that he was, took the hits without protest. 'It was hard to explain.'

'No  _shit_!' she said shrilly. '"He turned his  _dead twin_  into a  _puppet_! Oh, and is terrifyingly creepy!" There, I did it in,' a quick dialogue scan, 'less than twenty words!'

He nodded, taking this feedback in. Or so she hoped.

'And even with that, you still think he didn't kill him?!' she demanded.

'I do,' Iwao confirmed easily.

Raiku gestured soundlessly, vocal chords temporarily paralysed with sheer indignance. 'He's… the whole  _victim_  is his trophy!' she got out in the end. 'You can't tell me that doesn't raise some doubts!'

Iwao shook his head. 'Nothing was found. Akihito isn't that subtle.'

Raiku scowled. That, she had to admit, felt true. 'But Hijino just lets him carry that around! That's so traumatising!' she persisted.

Iwao came to a stop at Daisukenojo's front gate, the muffled sounds of the screaming Hatori siblings setting it apart from the other houses on the lane. 'Things got better, after,' he said, hand resting on the fence. 'I said before.'

Raiku had to stop and think hard for a second, the lines of writing in her mind already faint without the binding effect of the timeskip. 'They were always fighting,' she remembered. 'Putting you all in danger on missions. But… still. Aren't you upset by the whole thing?'

A louder voice came to the forefront in the house, almost making the plants flourishing in the yard lean away. It seemed Hatori Alpha, AKA: Daisuke's mother, was awake.

'No,' Iwao said simply. 'Things got better.'

'The puppet, though. The puppet, Iwao.'

A faint, wry smile. 'The puppet,' he agreed. 'Sorry.'

She hit him again in the shoulder, hard enough to make him stagger. Or at least that he felt he should pretend to stagger, because Iwao was gracious like that. 'I'm so mad at you,' she grumbled. 'And your creepy teammate.'

'Fair,' he said. 'Will you come?' He gestured towards the house. 'We are going to the poison lab, before the training forest.' The yelling had subsided slightly, but Raiku was never able to tell what was enthusiasm and what was anger, not with so many people and so much energy in one place. She shook her head.

'No way, you're on your own. Let me know how many Daisukenojos you find in there!'

Iwao tilted his head. 'How many?'

She sniggered. 'You'll see,' she repeated back to him, though her surprise wasn't going to be nearly as awful as his had been. It was still something to hold over him. She turned and walked away, knowing he was staring after her bemusedly. It was all about the little victories.

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku had decided that rooftops, as she'd long suspected, were too inherently Dramatic to be trusted. So many bad things happened to her on roofs. So she made her way around the village on foot, like a civilian, and it had honestly gone better than she'd expected. She managed to catch up with some of her cousins living amongst the Aburame, who seemed equal parts excited and wary of her electricity near their bug-intensive children, but it felt nice. It felt grounding, to be around her people and her family. Some of them had missed her, as evidenced by the fact that her uncle the florist let her sit at the counter without ushering her outside with a broom for a whole twenty minutes. She'd barbecued a zinnia before long, but in her defence, it'd been placed  _very_  close to her and her random electrical accidents were pretty well-known amongst the Gairano.

She'd long suspected that they published a newsletter to keep Raiku-related-damage-control at a comfortably high level.

Dusting the charred remains of the zinnia from her pants, she patted her rumbling stomach. Aburame Satomi, née Gairano, had happily given her something to eat mid-morning, but that had been over an hour ago. She was a growing girl. Or girl-like, whatever that meant. It was clearly time for her to eat again. She stuck her hands in her pockets and let herself slouch a little, after reflexively glancing around to make sure Yamada couldn't see her poor posture. It felt fantastic.

Actually it felt a little weird for her lower spine, so she quickly corrected it. But she kept her hands in her pockets, damnit, while she thought about what to do. She could actually go for a walk down the main street without Ryuu and Daisuke immediately dragging her into a barbecue joint, or the same place they always went. She could get takoyaki without Daisukenojo making faces at her. Or taiyaki without Ryuu immediately stealing it, that sweet-toothed bastard.

It was enough to bring a tear to her eye. She sniffled, overcome for a second with the sheer beauty of it all. Before she remembered Team Hijino.

She sagged slightly. Right. Hijino and Akihito were tourists. Sticking to residential areas like she had been, she wasn't going to run into them. But in the main shopping and dining area of the village? The risk of seeing them again was unacceptably high. Of seeing the puppet again.

But that wasn't so bad! She ignored the familiar feeling of a broom lightly butting up against the backs of her shoes, the pointed invitation to take her electricity away from her uncle's bouquet display and move elsewhere. She'd leave when she was good and ready, and the broom had stopped scaring her when she was five. Six. Okay, eleven, but she was certainly past that point now.

Raiku let herself travel on autopilot towards the more agriculturally-oriented part of the village, further from the centre of town but famous for its excellent dango. Plots shifted past her on the road but gave her a wide berth, occasionally dipping close enough to butt up against the fail-field and deflate a little. Depressingly near, in her opinion; her father could clear a room, but she had noticed her field only cleared a radius of about thirty centimetres.

She ducked around a woman holding a stack of books higher than her head, darting around her with totally unnecessary flair and smiling to herself. It was easy to forget that years of acrobatics, running, and strength conditioning meant she could twist and prance around whenever she wanted, not just when her life was in peril.

She vaulted over one of the street dividers just because she could.

She was feeling so positive, in the face of dango and the ruthless repression she'd employed on the puppet-memories from that morning, that when a familiar head of red hair was visible between buildings in the distance, she automatically changed her path to meet him.

'Hey man,' she called, when she grew close enough to Daisukenojo that she was confident he could hear her. 'I am so glad to see you. Have you met Iwao's team? Have you  _seen the puppet_?!' She shuddered. 'That puppet…' She stopped to take a breath halfway up the steps, leg twinging. Roof-climbing and stairs had not been part of her recuperation plan. 'I mean,' she muttered, 'taking it hard, that I get. But what he's doing is something else; is it narcissistic or necro-something? Is it just me that finds it weirdly psychosexual?'

Daisukenojo turned towards her and raised his eyebrows, hands shoved in his pockets. Apparently he'd chosen to take a rare Ryuu-break and spend it on the bridge leading to the verdant fields beyond, which… People liked water, Raiku could understand that objectively. It seemed sick and weird to her, but he probably found the sound of running water… reassuring? Soothing. Invigorating…?

She'd ask him at some stage, she decided. Right after she got this puppet-talk out of her system. 'And the eyes! You don't even… the eyes, Daisuke!' She gestured to her own emphatically. 'They're almost as creepy as his! At least those are blank for a reason, but his too?! And Hijino!' she added with a frustrated flick of her fingers. 'Am I the only one who feels personally victimised by attractive people just showing up all the time?! Isn't it rude?! You of all people get that, right?'

Silence. Daisukenojo seemed to have stuck with his general approach to her or Ryuu ranting, which seemed to be:  _are they going to hurt me? If no, ignore but make understanding noises so they don't think I'm ignoring them_.

He hummed a little when she'd been silent for too long. The wily bastard. She grinned and made her way closer, relieved for something normal even though she had to sidestep Plot, a heavy rope of it twisting up alongside her on the steps, curving around her and then again when it—

She stopped in her tracks on the second-highest step.

Mother  _fucker._

The Device didn't have arms to wave, but its presence in her mind seemed to ooze smugness. Where it sat on the bridge.

On that same  _fucking_  bridge.

Raiku seethed, one foot still braced on the top step. How had she already failed? She had one job, she had  _one job!_  She hadn't even thought about it, she'd just… been carried there by the events of the day. It had never occurred to her that she'd end up near the Device again if she wasn't actively seeking it out. She'd been to this bridge maybe five times in her  _whole life_  in Konoha, and yet.

Here she was.

Again.

On the fucking bridge.

Out of sheer pettiness, she stayed on the second-last step to avoid being on the bridge proper. She was still taller than Daisukenojo despite being a step lower, so it was the sort of thing she could get away with unless he felt patronised by it. She craned her neck around to see what Daisukenojo was looking at, hoping to start a conversation before he could question why she'd stopped.

Raiku repressed a sigh, because of course. The blind eyes of the Hokages stared out from the mountain, carved there to remain in perpetuity. She curled her lip. 'Creepy.'

Daisukenojo glanced at her.

She waved a hand vaguely. 'Ignore me.' But it was and she would stand by it. Logistics aside—they were going to run out of mountain at some point—the black lines tracing across their features made her eyes water just looking at them. They were so significantly weighted, in history and the Themes that Naruto liked best, that they were a constant source of and focal point for countless Plots and Character Arcs. She'd been taken there as a child, like all Gairano children were at some stage. What seemed like spiderwebs at a distance were vast swathes of Plot up close, so thick and rife with Drama that even her father's fail-field hadn't repelled any of it on approach. Her cousin Pan had vomited when she'd gone, but she was a little older than the other kids and had known enough to understand what it meant.

Raiku had almost fallen off the Sandaime's face. It hadn't been a great day.

She warily scanned Daisukenojo for signed of Plot potential latching on; no one ever stared at the Hokages without something trying to latch on.

To her profound relief, the ground around his feet was devoid of Plot. He was standing a little too close to the impenetrably thick Plot headed over the bridge, headed for Naruto, but it was neatly avoiding him, a perfect curve of empty ground around his feet. She resisted the urge to coo at him; Daisuke had never really been Character material, and she couldn't help but love him for it.

Anyway.

'Did you get Iwao to the research lab okay?' she asked. 'He's mentioned that sort of stuff before, but I didn't know he was good enough for them to let a foreign shinobi in there. Though, I guess Sand is known to be way better at it than us.' She quickly ducked her head. 'Don't tell Ryuu's mother I said that. She'd be so upset with me.'

God. Jun, doting mother of Ryuu and professional poison engineer. That had been a weird set of truths to reconcile.

'Of course,' Daisukenojo said, shooting her a look.

She raised her hands. 'I'm not insinuating anything! You have to admit, though, that escort missions are not your strong suit!'

He huffed.

She grinned at him and poked his shoulder, but he just huffed at her again to drive the point home. 'I'm glad you guys are being friendly,' she said fondly. 'He's a good guy. Quiet, but he's the best one in his team for sure. I met them this morning, hence all the puppet ranting. He was on the way to your house and he caught me on the roof again.'

Something about that stuck in her mind, sending up a warning signal. On her day off. Rude. But she reluctantly turned her attention to what she'd said, scanning it for issues. The unlikely friendship of Daisukenojo and Iwao, Iwao's general disposition, meeting his team.

his team.

After which he had gone to meet… Daisukenojo, so he could show him to the poisons lab before he met to train with Ryuu. In the forest, rather than the field that day.

Raiku dragged her hands down her face roughly, just about ready to give up on a vacation day and slink on home.

Son of a  _bitch_ , it was one of the Duplinojos. A clever name she was refusing to say out loud in case it sounded stupid instead of as hilarious as it was in her head.

Raiku smirked to herself a little before masterfully straightening her face. 'So I guess we should head off, huh?' she asked, casually brushing dust off Daisuke's shoulder. At the last second she let her fingers linger over his exposed shoulder, sending a playful jolt through as she exclaimed, 'gotcha!'

A puff of smoke, the brief feeling of victory. Then a split second in which time seemed frozen, the smoke just cleared enough for pale skin and lines like slashes of black ink, wide eyes, a blur of red and black clothing in her peripheral vision. An elegant, angular face she had never fully seen but knew immediately.

' _U-chi-ha_ ,' she heard herself say impossibly slowly, her mind racing too rapidly for the world to seem anything but caught in slow-motion until it caught up in a flash, suddenly too fast and bright and overwhelming. Raiku was twisting away before she consciously recognised the attack for what it was, pulling herself to the side. A line of fire burst across her chest, an arc of blue-white lightning splashing out between them, torn out by the knife in his hand. It hung there for a moment in her shock before red spattered across him and the railing at his back, blood sizzling and crackling where it landed.

The Plot hadn't told her. It hadn't clung to him the way it should have. It hadn't even touched him.

For a moment, Raiku felt something like betrayal.

She couldn't meet his eyes. His eyes were death. She couldn't meet his eyes but Raiku wasn't good at listening to her better thoughts and she slipped. Just for a split second, she looked towards him when he came towards her again, so close already and they locked gazes. His eyes were death, and Raiku met them and the realisation wasn't a bolt of lightning, or a crashing weight. She met his eyes, and

they recognised each other.

That feeling again. Of gravity, of having been falling and landing, and she saw him. In that older, quieter part of her mind, she knew him; it spoke more in feelings than in thoughts, spoke then in a quiet sigh.

Oh. It's you.

Something like recognition in eyes flashing too black to be anything just physical and the world shuddered and warped violently, oil slicks of Plot hurtling around them to curve in towards her, towards the invisible force between them, arcing over his skin but never touching before it went on its way. Weaving around her, the Device between them, around him, all exactly the same.

Her father hadn't answered, she realised; he'd never told her who it was, the one so unlike her and so essentially the same.

And then she was alone. The interrupted spray of her blood had burnt spots into the bridge, two broken lines. Uchiha Itachi, as well as the Device that had sat between them, was gone.

Raiku stood on the bridge and heard, felt, the water rushing beneath her. The wind rustled through the trees, cooling her skin even through all her layers, and she just stood there, paralysed by shock and the feeling of falling, so briefly gone before she lost herself to gravity again.

She felt it.

She hadn't understood what Tsuji had said, hadn't grasped what he meant at the time, but she was left on the bridge and god, she felt it then.

She was so alone.


	75. the most hated of landmarks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: graphics description of a panic attack, rumination on death

'You stabbed yourself,' Ryuu said flatly.

'Yep,' Raiku confirmed. She winced as a stitch was pulled particularly tight near her shoulder. Shizune cast her a warning look,carefully gripping a needle that felt all wrong for metal.

'Stay still,' she scolded, before focusing again on the wide slash, digging it back into flesh. Raiku, now used to this, made a token whining noise but held still for the pain-hot line of pinching, throbbing points to stretch further and further across. The slice was painfully red and sore around the edges where stitches already done were pulling at damaged skin, and there was dried blood from it to where Shizune had rolled her shirt just far down enough to tend to it. It flaked and itched when she moved. Like her skin was trying to peel back and leave her raw and bloody.

'Oh, no – you  _slashed_  yourself,' Ryuu corrected. He folded his arms against his own, undamaged chest. 'In a  _line_.'

'I did,' Raiku said with a nod.

'You slashed yourself, across your  _own chest_ , in a  _perfectly straight line_ , perfectly perpendicular to your  _goddamn vertical axis_.'

Raiku feigned interest, looking down and looking from an angle to see around Shizune's bent head. 'Is it?'

'It is,' Ryuu confirmed.

'Well,' she said, 'stranger things have happened.' Had happened earlier in the day, even, had left fear unfolding even still in her chest like her heart was some skittering thing. Stranger things had happened, certainly. Skittering, skittering.

' _Have_  they?' Ryuu asked, skitter-thing-free. 'Have they really?'

'This is going to scar, I'm afraid,' Shizune sighed with an upwards glance at her.

Raiku blinked. 'Okay?' she offered when this seemed to require a response, not really sure why it was important, not sure what to keep track of when so many things seemed to be happening at once. Shizune snorted and started tying off. 'And yes! I can think of several stranger things,' she stressed with a firm look, 'just off the top of my head. My one singular Raiku head, the only one that looks like it in all the world.  _Ryuu_.'

He narrowed his eyes. Shizune ignored this statement, apparently not finding this line of dialogue strange in any way. Raiku chose to believe that said more about Shizune than it did about her, but knew she was in denial.

She was in denial.

'And how did you manage that?' Ryuu asked. His voice was remaining at a perfectly even level of volume. He only did that when he was trying not to yell, so Raiku quickly leaned closer to Shizune.

'You know,' she said. 'I was using knives. Wires.' Wires made more sense, made more sense than any of it. 'I was using wires and, then. Fell.'

'You were using knife-wire – something you claim exists – and fell on it,' Ryuu repeated. Raiku winced.

'No, just wires.'

'So you said "knives", why?'

Why had there been knives, and why hadn't she known? Why hadn't she seen?

'It was an  _accident_ , Ryuu—' She broke off into a yelp more out of surprise than pain when Shizune brushed a broad line of antiseptic across the fresh stitches. She glanced down and the brown-tinted cream shone sickly over the neat black stitchwork, over the injured red of the flesh beneath. She looked like someone had tried to cut her in half, she thought, and skitter-skitter; the shape of fear still scrabbling at her ribs to try and get out. Clawing up her throat faster than she could swallow it back.

She looked at the door again, and there was no one there. She wished that someone would close it again.

'You were lucky,' Shizune informed her, yanking a fresh bandage out of its plastic packaging. 'This wasn't shrug-it-off-shallow, but it was the same depth all the way through. Any deeper and you would have been in serious trouble. As it is, I've stitched you up for the remaining depth where the chakra hasn't fully closed the wound, but you could have really damaged yourself this time. Your subclavian artery,' she stressed, jabbing Raiku just close to the shoulder joints on each side, 'is vulnerable in both these places, or your aortic arch would be to a stab right here in the middle of it. At basically only this angle. You'd have bled out before you got anywhere near help.'

Raiku rubbed the spot, frowning. 'Okay, uncalled-for attacking of the patient, thank you.' Artery, subclavian. Arch, aortic. Artery, artery, artery. She pushed her hand down harder, trying to feel the pressure, trying to feel her heartbeat against her hand.

'Only that angle, huh,' Ryuu said, glaring at her while she kept her eyes on the empty doorway to the left of Shizune's shoulder, pressing down. Down, down, down.

Shizune huffed and made a gesture. 'Lift your right arm.'

Raiku obeyed, wincing, and turned her attention back to Ryuu while Shizune started to wrap. 'Also, why are you even here? Did the smell of my blood lure you in?'

Ryuu glared. 'I think my presence here is the most explicable part of this, don't you?' he asked.

'I do  _not_ ,' Raiku replied, a high and brittle laugh bubbling out. 'I don't think that  _at all_.'

'He was in the hospital already,' Shizune said, pushing Raiku's left arm down, lifting her right and starting a second roll of bandages. Layers of linen were crossed over her chest to get the incision around the shoulders, and layered further in to cover the centre. 'He was revising field tracheotomies with Shuchihara. He came downstairs with me when you arrived.'

'I'm going to pretend that sentence didn't happen,' Raiku mused. 'Just anything about tracheas and Ryuu, really. Not a thing. Weren't you with Daisukenojo?' Daisukenojo, who she hadn't seen at all that day. Who hadn't really been there at all.

She dug her fingers back into her collarbone, trying to focus on the pain.

'He and Konishi were sparring with Yamada guiding. I came back here to revise.'

Raiku raised her eyebrows and lowered her arm at Shizune's nudge, heat blooming where she'd pressed a fresh bruise into herself. 'I can't believe you turned down a chance to beat up someone new and exciting.'

Ryuu looked his trademark blend of bored and irritated. It was reassuringly normal, even if the tightness around his eyes belied his lingering anger. 'I didn't. Yamada wanted me to fight someone with a purely physical technique and it wasn't going to work with Konishi's particular one. His abdominal armour expands when he breathes and exposes weaknesses if he inhales too deeply, so he compensates with controlled breathing and chakra to maintain oxygen saturation. He can't spar with me like he can Daisuke or you, not with technique inclusion.'

Because Ryuu would just suffocate him, Raiku filled in. Like Iwao was a self-glazing cake, he made his own little stone casket for Ryuu to bury him in. And Ryuu would have enjoyed that, for about five minutes. Like a cat killing a mouse too fast and wandering off, bored. She took a second to quickly remind herself that Iwao was an exceptionally dangerous young man and not a mouse left on a doorstep. 'So in a real fight,' she guessed, 'he'd have to kill you as soon as possible. Which doesn't work in a training scenario.' Kill you, kill you.

Kill you. Her fingers twitched.

'It wouldn't work in either scenario,' Ryuu said darkly. Shizune pulled back and away from Raiku, tugging her latex gloves off with a snap. Raiku flinched at the noise, too sudden and sharp.

'All done. Try not to scratch at it this time.' She slingshotted the glove neatly into the nearby bin.

Raiku gingerly rolled her shoulders back, feeling the sharp pull of the stitches across her chest. 'Thanks, Shizune.' She gripped the side of the bench for a moment, fingers squeezing hard and starting to hurt against the metal frame. Ryuu was glaring and Shizune was helping, and she'd thought he was Daisuke and she'd thought she was starting to understand and then it had been  _him_  instead, staring at her and seeing too much and with her blood, her  _blood_  just sprayed across his chest like it was nothing.

Raiku let out a shaky breath, then again, steadier. Forced it to be smoother again, until almost shaking with the effort in fine motor control, it left her in a steady stream.

Ryuu was watching her when she looked up. 'Raiku,' he said.

She pushed herself off the bed, rolling her shoulders back again for the sting. 'Am I good, or do you need me to take anything?' she asked brightly, loudly.

Shizune waved a hand. 'No painkillers for you, not after last time. Bandages changed twice a day for the first three—'

'Once a day after,' she finished. 'And check for infection whenever I get them changed. Got it.'

'Any increased pain or fever, you come right back,' Shizune added sternly.

Raiku saluted with two fingers, a flippant gesture that always worked for Kakashi. 'No problems, boss.' She ducked around her out into the hallway, not bothering to check and see if Ryuu was following. Which was insane, because when had she started assuming he would shadow her? But Shizune called him back before he could follow, and Raiku snapped out of it quickly enough to escape, sliding into the elevator at the last second and breathing a sigh of relief when the doors closed, leaving her alone in it.

Alone.

She could hear a high noise escaping with her breaths and reached up, digging hard into the fresh line of stitches to feel the pain. The thick bandaging reduced it to a dull ache that set her teeth on edge, but was nowhere near enough. She just had to get home. She just had to keep it together, to keep breathing, until she got home. Everything would be fine.

Raiku reached forward and jabbed the ground floor button again, impatient. The level display ticked from three, to two, then hung.

She jabbed the button again, but it didn't depress. It stuck hard, and the elevator shuddered.

She glanced up at the ceiling, but it didn't seem like her death was coming through the trapdoor there. She looked back at the doors, and the dark line between them suddenly seemed to expand. She yelped and plastered herself to the opposite wall, convinced for a second the elevator was being pried open from the outside by force, but it wasn't.

Of course it wasn't.

It oozed outwards and darkened the walls until they shone wetly, light reflecting off black, slick Plot all around her where there had been nothing before. Layers upon layers, stretching out to cover the walls, the floor and the ceiling, flecked through the air. It shuddered once before she could react, sending her staggering to keep her balance. She recoiled in on herself to try and keep her hands from touching the walls, trying to keep her feet in the perfect circle of untouched ground that the Plot was pooling around. She knew it was the fail-field, that it would just move with her. But she felt rooted in place, in her island free of contamination.

A line shot through the slickness like shrapnel, like a hard ricochet that delineated the oozing mass, rocketing off out of sight down the hall.

Something was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong wrongwrongwong _wrong_ -

A shockwave rushed through and broke on an invisible barrier around her, surging through the Plot like an explosion, like the tremors from an earthquake. Raiku ducked instinctively and covered her head even though she knew, she knew it wasn't physical, even though there wasn't even a change in the air to tell her something was happening. By the time she felt able to open her eyes, the walls were just the walls again. The floor was just the floor. The feeling, the certainty of wrongness had dissipated, leaving something like rightness just by contrast.

The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open to the ground floor.

She cautiously straightened and scanned the empty air in front of her, the lobby beyond. The sounds of people walking by filtered back in, through Plotless space.

Raiku nodded. Once. Twice.

And then she shrieked and sprinted for home.

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku arrived home panting, leg aching fiercely, and she slammed the door shut behind her. The compound was always mercifully free of Plot, including pollution by abstract concepts of good and bad. 'Dad!' she yelled, only remembering to take her shoes off hallway down the hall and just hurling them back towards the door. 'Dad!'

'In here!'

Raiku swerved left and stopped in her tracks at the sight of him tightening the straps on his small field-pack at the kitchen table. 'Are you going somewhere?' she asked faintly.

He nodded, zipping up the front compartment. 'I'm tagging along on a Jounin assessment for a friend, as the third-party assessor. It'll be a few days out of the village, then one day assessment work once I get back.'

Raiku boggled at him. 'You want to go now? Now?!' she demanded. 'Uzumaki's training in the village limits, who knows who's coming to come and try to cause trouble with him here?!'

He waved her off. 'It's the best time. No major villain arcs when it's focused on his personal development, I'll be done before he starts moving into Event-based arcs. Just a few days. It's really safest to do it right now, really.'

I know something you don't know, Raiku thought deliriously, and had opened her mouth to speak when he continued.

'From now on, missions are just going to get riskier and riskier for us,' he said, tucking a spool of explosive tags into a side pocket. 'Antagonists are going to be cropping up more, and you know what that means. I'm not sure either Izai or Senta are ready to take over for me, so I want to put in some hours before it gets too hairy. Buy myself a little more time to pick one of them.'

'Take over?' she asked dumbly, and he raised his eyebrows at her.

Take over, she repeated to herself. Take over. From… her dad.

Her dad, the Gairano shinobi. Out in the violence, and the blood. With indestructible enemies and blades everywhere, a world full of pitfalls no one else could see. Her dad, forgotten by the universe.

She found herself gripping the archway for support. 'Already?'

He nodded, finally zipping the last compartment shut. 'I am over forty, now,' he reminded her. 'It's not like I can keep doing this forever. We've got Antagonists falling out of the woodwork every other week, so I have to be more cautious. I'm getting old, after all,' he added with a grin, a joke in the face of Raiku holding onto the arch to stay upright.

Forty wasn't old. Forty wasn't old and it wasn't  _fair._

'You alright?' he asked. 'You seem…' He gestured vaguely at her. 'Off.'

She tried to say yes. She really did. But she was shaking her head before she knew it, a high whine escaping. He immediately rounded the table, hands hovering awkwardly over her. 'Honey, what's wrong?' he asked, ducking his head to try and meet her lowered gaze, settling for taking hold of her shoulders. 'It wasn't the age talk, was it? There's really no need to worry, this is a nothing mission. I'm there as an assessor for three non-Characters, I couldn't be more under the radar if I tried!'

Non-Characters, so that was fine. Characters being the risk, being the greatest possible danger to her dad.

Her dorky, loving, expendable dad.

How long would it take the Uchiha to kill him, she wondered. To cut him down, and never think of him again.

But she couldn't just say nothing, she had to tell him. She had to tell  _someone_ , so someone would know. Someone would know besides her and it wouldn't feel like she was choking on it, suffocating on the thought she was going to die alone and afraid and no one would know why.

She had to say  _something_. She had to say his name out loud.

Raiku sagged forward into her father's grip, lowering her head to his shoulder. 'I got stabbed,' she said, voice thick. 'I got stabbed in training today and it really hurt, and Shizune can't give me painkillers after that one time so it stung really badly, and you know how chakra healing gets all weird with me after a while so it isn't fully healed and she says it's going to scar and Ryuu is mad for some reason—'

'He's always mad,' her dad dismissed, 'don't worry about him.'

A fair point.

'But stabbed, though—you weren't meant to be at training today,' he said with a frown. 'How bad was it? Should you be at home yet?'

Raiku sniffed and rubbed at her chest. 'No, it's fine,' she mumbled. 'It just hurts.'

He squeezed her shoulders lightly. 'I bet it does. I can postpone my mission if you want me to stay with you—'

'No!' she said quickly, head snapping up to look at him. 'I'll be fine! I just sort of wanted to… vent a bit… It's not that bad, really.'

He made a wary humming noise. 'It's okay if you're upset about it, you know. It's really no big deal.' He offered her a tentative smile. 'It's a bunch of middling Chuunins, they really can wait a few days. They only picked me because they thought a Gairano would go easy on them.'

Her laugh sounded more like a sob for a second and she scrubbed at her eyes. 'When are things with us ever easy?' she asked.

He smiled lopsidedly. Wistfully. 'Some things are,' he said, ruffling her hair. 'Are you sure you don't want me to stay? I promise you, it wouldn't be a problem.'

She shook her head and gave him a watery smile. 'I'll be fine,' she repeated, 'I'll feel better once I've slept. Promise.'

She'd feel better once he was out of the house. As far away from Uchiha as possible.

He let go of her shoulders and picked up his pack, then paused.

'Are you sure?'

She took a deep breath and plastered on a smile. This, at least, she knew how to handle.

It took ten minutes of him hesitating at the door and her encouraging him to go through her teeth, stretching herself closer and closer to fraying just to get him out, to get him to go before the door finally closed on his reluctant face and she sagged against the wall of the hallway, exhausted.

She made her slow, shuffling way back to the kitchen. She had to eat something. She'd lost blood and needed iron. She nodded to herself—a good thought, Raiku. That had been a good thought to have.

She made it all the way to the cupboard before the insidious second thought surfaced.

Why bother, when she would lose the rest soon?

Raiku slammed the cupboard shut in a flare of frustration with herself.

She knew better than this. People couldn't discover the Genematrix. If they were told, they forgot. If they worked it out, they forgot. If a carrier pigeon dropped a message about it on them, they still forgot. The Gairano swore never to tell just to keep the holes to a minimum, to keep the risk of the Genematrix filling in the gaps with something that could hurt the family instead, but that was the risk.

He had forgotten already. He had to have.

She had no reason to feel so certain that he hadn't, just because he was Uchiha Itachi. That didn't make him any less of a pawn than the other Characters, Device or not.

Raiku drummed her fingers on the counter, trying to calm herself down. He had forgotten.

…and even if he'd just forgotten seeing her, recognising her, remembering that he'd run into some Gairano while he was in disguise wouldn't be enough for him to come after her. Seeing Raiku as herself would have been cutting it too close to him seeing a Device, so odds were he'd forgotten running into anyone at all. He wasn't coming after her. Uchiha Itachi wasn't going to walk through the compound for her, killing everyone in his path before finally killing Raiku just to finish the day on a high note.

But then…

 _Could_  he even kill her?

Raiku caught herself reaching for her collarbone again and balled her hands into fists, resting them on the countertop instead. She let the thought present itself, despite every fibre of her being trying to resist.

Was that a function a Device even  _had_ , to kill another one? Could Devices technically even be killed, would it even count as killing her or was it just… editing? Taking away a body she wasn't meant to have at all? As a Device, she had to consider that maybe Destruction hadn't been meant to have legs in the first place and then the Gairano got involved and messed it all up. Maybe that was the point. Maybe he'd been drawn to the Device on the bridge, maybe they'd pulled her in together so he could just end her shenanigans before the Plot got serious. Maybe that was the kind of Device he was, typical of an Uchiha. The kind that tidied things up whether they were people or not. It certainly fit with his Backstory.

The heat spilling down her chest made her fear for a moment that her stitches had somehow split while she sat there. When she frantically touched the front of her shirt and found it dry, when she tried to breathe in and couldn't, she realised it was just panic.

Oh, she thought. That makes sense.

And then she was crouching with her back against the counters, thumping her chest hard and clearing her throat, dragging in quick, harsh breaths to try and ease the pressure. The line of stitches just ached at the stretch and she hunched down further, clasping her hands on the top of her head and squeezing in with her elbows, muffling a long, hard scream into her knees, until she felt lightheaded and crunched in on herself as a vacuum. She couldn't breathe and she was going to die, he was going to come and kill her and there was nothing she could do about it, he was coming to kill her and she was going to miss so much, she was going to miss  _everything_  and her dad was going to be sad and then her dad was going to die as well probably because of her, it was her fault it was all her  _fault_ —

She gasped for air but it felt too thin for what felt like forever, inhaling through the fabric of her pants until the tight, hot spring wound to the breaking point in her chest started to unwind and her head felt light, dizzy. By the time it had eased enough for her to register her hands were hurting, her stomach was hurting from tensing and her arms were shaking, her throat felt hot and swollen. Breathing had been touch and go with her but she was suddenly exhausted by it, drawing great, shuddering breaths like that would somehow help. She started to uncurl like a wrung-out rag, frayed and twisted, unfolding her legs slowly in front of her on the tiles. A hiccupping sob broke through intermittently just to startle her.

Raiku sat there for a long moment on the cool tiles, head resting back against the cupboard.

It was all her fault, she thought. But there wasn't anything she could do about it. Whatever he was—whatever her brain was trying to tell her he was—he couldn't really be like her. He was too important, too central. He had no fail-field, and therefore was just exactly what he was meant to be. And that meant he was someone who could kill her if he wanted, and she wouldn't know if it counted or not.

She pressed her hands to her temples hard, using the pressure to focus herself while she caught her breath. Which felt ridiculous, because breathing had been the problem in the first place, but she felt suddenly so worn out. After a long, long moment, she dragged herself to the table and pulled out a chair and collapsed into it. She could see all the doors and windows from where she sat, the fading light of evening casting them in shadow. Every darkness a space that the Uchiha could come from, with his Uchiha-red, Device-black eyes.

After a moment she took her gloves off and pressed her hands to the wood of the table, feeling the grain beneath her fingertips.

She waited.

 

 

 

 

 

Raiku sat at the kitchen table until her cousins started coming down for breakfast, but there was nothing to stay up for. Her nerves were stretched thin, her eyes hot and gritty by the time she gave in and made her way to the training grounds. She should have just slept, she knew. It wouldn't matter if she was awake or not if he decided to kill her; she'd probably never see it coming anyway. There was certainly nothing she'd be able to do to stop him, either way.

She'd just wanted to see.

The Uchiha hadn't shown himself, but she had known when it passed midnight without needing to check; that was when the time when Tsuji would have broken her sleep, when the pervasive sense of wrongness had crept back. Far more removed under layers upon the layers of fail-fields overlapping the compound, the shudder of the subsequent Plot shockwave that had dispelled it had only vaguely registered for her, so far from its unknown epicentre. She had still shuddered, her flare answering electricity casting the kitchen in flickering blue light.

But the Uchiha hadn't come, and the feeling hadn't returned. She'd just stayed at the table and waited, and the day began like it always did.

When she arrived at the training grounds, Iwao and Daisuke were already sitting on the log they had gotten into the habit of meeting by, sipping tea in silence. Raiku grabbed some from the thermos and grunted in greeting, only to choke and sputter when she actually tasted it. 'What the hell is this?!'

'It's mint, you freak,' Daisukenojo grumbled. 'Spraying it everywhere, what's wrong with you?'

'Mint—we have long agreed that mint tea is an abomination, it tastes like what tea actually is! Leaves!' Maybe that was a bit much, but fatigue was only one of the many things Raiku didn't handle with any particular grace. 'Leaves, Daisuke!'

Iwao glanced at his cup thoughtfully, but Daisuke shoved at his knee. 'It's fine that you like it, you moron, don't let the crackling throw you off. She always does that when she's tired.'

Crackling? What—oh. Raiku gritted her teeth and dialled it back, the bright glow dimming on her skin. He had her there. The urge to give herself the boost was automatic, a rush to replace the more organic energy that sleep would have given her.

Daisuke nodded, waving a hand at her. 'See, she'll be doing that all day. Like she's got a dimmer switch. Just tell her off and she'll cut it out.'

'Tired?' Iwao repeated, looking at her. 'You were injured yesterday.'

Raiku shrugged, forcing herself to take another sip of the appalling tea. 'It's not so bad. I've had worse.' Only once, but it had been very bad. 'You know how it is.'

'Do we?' Ryuu remarked, appearing beside her rather than walking there like a normal person. She rolled her eyes and prayed for patience. ' _Do we_  know how it is to slash ourselves? Or wait, was it a stab? Remind me.'

'Who can say?' she asked around a jaw-popping yawn. 'Life is mysterious.'

He had bags under his eyes. It sadly didn't detract from his bright yellow glare. 'Isn't it.'

"Good morning, my feeble goddamn sunflowers!" Yamada called, almost startling Raiku out of her skin. "How are we? Wait, Speedy, what the hell are you doing here? You're falling apart!"

'I'm not—"falling apart" is a strong phrase,' she protested. 'I want to stay!'

Her smile felt strained. More specifically, after all, she didn't want to be at the kitchen table anymore, waiting to die. He would kill her or he wouldn't, she reminded herself again. Brooding wouldn't save her and she'd already gone over her quota and had to borrow against next month. He would or he wouldn't. Would. Wouldn't.

Raiku shuddered, just once, and pretended she couldn't feel Ryuu watching her.

Yamada frowned. "You look like hell, Speedy."

' _Wow.'_

Iwao raised a hand. 'Training should reflect life. Sleep isn't guaranteed.'

Daisukenojo made a disapprovingly clicking noise with his tongue. 'I think she'd just kill them, then. Save herself the risk of trying to incapacitate them.'

'Maybe.'

'And she is way better at killing people than Ryuu, just by accident even. Going off numbers alone.'

It was hard to say who was more offended by this, Raiku or Ryuu. They glanced at each other, the tension between them briefly put aside in the face of deciding who had the most right to get irritated.

Yamada, as usual, decided it was him. "I did not open this to the floor, get me?!" he said loudly. "This is not a democracy!"

'Nothing in Konoha is a democracy,' Raiku muttered, because the Gairano had Views on martial aptitude as a means of political succession.

'She'll kill him!' Daisukenojo pointed out. 'You can't seriously want them to train together when she's like this! She almost electrocuted him over tea!'

'Boiled mint leaves,' Raiku pointed out lamely.

Ryuu tilted his head. 'That's not tea, that's garbage. Why did you even make it?'

Daisukenojo glowered. 'Why did anyone make  _you_ , asshole—'

"It's too early for this bullshit," Yamada groaned, scrubbing a hand down his face. "You do look terrible, Speedy."

Raiku wasn't above begging, but the thin note of hysteria in her voice wasn't there by choice. 'Please let me stay, it'll be fine! I promise, I promise it'll be fine, just let me stay!' She could hear the crackling again. It wouldn't help her case, but she was so tired. How was it fair? Destruction on two legs and here she was, shaking because of one Uchiha who'd been sent to war too young and ruined everything for everyone. Even trying to whine about it in her head didn't fly because she knew, she knew the Gairano were free, after all. She was free to be afraid.

Yamada looked at her shrewdly. She tried not to fidget, realised even that would be out of character, and did it anyway. She twisted her hands in her shirt and tried to look harmless instead.

"You promise to stop when it hurts?" he asked. "Or if you start getting too into it, you stop right away. Get me?"

It would be inappropriate to kiss Yamada, Raiku knew, but the way she brightened must have told him she was thinking about it because he quickly leaned away. 'Yes! I get you!'

He nodded. "Good. And you two, we need to go over some notes from the training yesterday, which we'll do first. Speedy, you may as well listen in."

A cloud seemed to pass and block out the sun, casting them in a shadow. Which was something the weather did, so Raiku didn't pay any attention until black flecks started drifting through the air.

'Oh come on,' she muttered under her breath, yanking her arms in and feet together to minimise the space she was taking up while Yamada started ticking off items on his fingers, given notes now drowned out by snippets of noise from Plot. 'Not these histrionics again, why can't you just—'

Plot started seeping up from beneath the ground, forming around her in a circle that spread out past the treeline, starting to ooze from the branches and leaves.

The feeling was back again, this time so strong and pointed that the words to describe it came into her head automatically, dredged up from nowhere.

_Something was wrong, and it had to be found._

_Something was wrong, and it had to be fixed._

She closed her eyes and waited for the shockwave to come and get rid of it, to send the Plot back to wherever it belonged. It came with the subtlety she was starting to expect, a world-bending rush that made her gasp and cringe, curling into herself until the voices of her teammates started to filter back in.

She cautiously creaked an eye open just in time to see how the aftershocks settled the Plot back into the background, seeping into the scenery like it had never been there. She looked up reflexively.

Not a cloud in the sky.

'What are you doing here?' Daisuke asked her. She jumped, then glanced around, assuming he was talking to someone else. 'You're hurt, idiot, you still have a few days off.'

Seeing no one, Raiku pointed to herself just to make sure.

'You—of course you! Who else?!'

Raiku shifted her weight uncertainly. 'Didn't we just say it was fine?'

'Oh, yeah right,' he scoffed. 'Get out of here before your arm… pops off, or something. Yamada! You told her to go home, she's defying you!'

She turned to look at Yamada so quickly she almost lost balance. 'Yamada, back me up here!'

He set his hands on his hips and glowered disapprovingly. "Speedy, the last thing we need is you getting too tired and blowing a Stripes-shaped hole in our relations with Sand, get me? Go rest."

Raiku whined, long and pitiful. 'No, come on, let me stay! Please?!'

'Who the hell wants to train this badly?' Daisukenojo asked incredulously. 'Ryuu tried to shove a needle in my eye yesterday, that is what you're missing out on.'

'You left your face exposed,' Ryuu pointed out, and which was reassuringly in-character for him.

'I left my  _eyes_  exposed. To  _see_  with.'

"Enough!" Yamada shouted, loud enough to scare birds out of the surrounding trees and probably deafen them. They fell silent. Mostly out of percussive shock. He pointed at her. "Speedy, you're out. Go rest and come back when your mandatory rest period is over, get me?!"

She opened her mouth to protest, but the lingering ringing in her ears convinced her to close it again. 'Can I stay and watch?' she asked weakly instead.

'Okay, go ahead and tell me that is something she'd usually want,' Ryuu said, pointing at her accusingly. 'Tell me  _that's_  normal.'

"I said go rest, Speedy!" Yamada repeated over the top of him, steamrolling him with sheer volume so effectively that Ryuu lapped into a low, seething hiss. Raiku cringed away with another keening noise, but stuck her hands into her pockets and stomped back down the path to the village. Steadfastly avoiding the bridge. Of death. The doom-bridge.

Actually, could she just burn the bridge down? Was that an option? After an exciting few seconds, she decided against it. Knowing her luck, the Uchiha would rise out of its ashes like a murderous phoenix. And she'd be left facing him again when all she'd wanted was to spend her day with her team, and the sense of security and normalcy that came with them.

But this wasn't her teammates' fault, she knew. This wasn't them.

This was the goddamn Genematrix.

The growl that had been slowly rising came out of her in a snarl. 'What the hell?!' She spun on her heel, throwing out a hand and sending a bolt of electricity hurtling towards a nearby tree, the deafening clap of thunder and the crack of it splitting enough to make her feel just a little better. 'Why?! Why the hell would you do that?!' She kicked at one of the smouldering pieces of the trunk that had blown free, leg twinging mercilessly to remind her why, exactly, she was being excluded.

Unsurprisingly, the Genematrix failed to answer her. Honestly, she probably would have been worse off if it had. But that sense was starting to come back.

_Something was wrong, and it had to be found._

_Something was wrong, and it had to be fixed._

'I can't—that's not my  _problem_!' she cried, sending out another explosive electrical wave with a slash of her hand. 'I don't know what you  _want_ —no, no, you can't even want anything in the first place, just leave me out of it!'

The ground shook. Another tree came down in a flash of electricity from her outstretched hand, and the smell of smoke started to fill the air. Traces of burning leaves drifted through the air, too much like the drifting flakes of Plot, far too soon.

'Hey, hey!' someone called. 'Hey, Raiku! Are you alright?!'

' _What_?!' she snarled, turning with her hand thrown out and glowing vicious-white.

Naruto threw his hands up. 'Whoa!'

Raiku thought about it. Looking at his face cast in white-blue light, wide-eyed, she really, truly did.

She lowered her hand wearily, her power dying down. 'Naruto,' she said.

He scratched side of his face uncertainly. 'You okay?' he asked. 'We saw the smoke on our way back to the village, I wanted to come check it out.'

Raiku could feel her shoulders sagging with defeat. She didn't know who "we" referred to but she knew it wouldn't mean anything good. 'It's eight in the morning. Why were you coming back so early?'

She knew why. Plot disturbances trying to catch something and a Device on legs? Why not throw Naruto at it, a Narrative factor so significant that he could steamroll over any problems.

He grinned. 'We've been training for a few days straight, just came back for a bit of sleep before we head back out. But yeah, you okay?' His eyes were very blue, and his hair was very bright. Every part of him was perfectly laid out to draw attention in the simplest way. It was exhausting just to look at him when she was already so tired; hard to stomach the purity of those colours and the sincerity written all over him, the Plot winding over his skin like veins. Even dishevelled and bruised, he wasn't dimmed at all.

Raiku flicked her fingers at him, just to see the strangely uneasy way he always watched that motion. 'Just. Frustrated and… really tired. I got beaten up in training and now I can't join in. I got a bit mad.'

Naruto looked away from her to take in what was now a smouldering wreckage of twisted, split trees, the gently smouldering ashes and splinters lying around them. 'Ye-ep,' he agreed with a snicker. 'Just a bit.'

That was one of the things she really hated about him, Raiku decided. The way he could have verbs like "snicker" but not seem to be doing them at anyone. Like he had so much free cheer and amusement that it just spilled out of him, directionless.

She reached up and forcefully rubbed at her features, taking them out of the scowl she'd felt forming.

He rubbed his hands together. 'That does suck. Wanna get breakfast with me? I'll even let you shout me.'

Raiku glared at him balefully. 'How nice of you.'

He grinned again, unapologetic. 'I know, right?' He turned her with a light push on his way past her, prompting her to fall into step beside him. She was both drawn and repulsed by the sheer Narrative weight of him, a distortion all of its own. 'I'm such a gentleman.'

'Where are we even going?' she asked helplessly. Despairingly, hoping he wouldn't pick up on it.

'Oh man… I sort of feel like ramen!' he laughed, eyes as fever-bright as ever. 'We can cut through here, take a shortcut.'

Raiku knew. She knew where he was taking her. She knew and she still walked, defeated, caught in his impossible slipstream until finally they reached it.

The goddamn.

Fucking.

 _Bridge_.

It was enough to make her want to burst into tears. The sudden feeling that her life was being twisted into a circle, an orbit that revolved around her least favourite kind of landmark and there was nothing she could do about it, that she was trapped in a loop she could recognise but not prevent. The Device was there, waiting to draw her in. She just knew it, but she couldn't get away from it, and the sense of inevitability was crushing. She dragged her foot up one of the concrete steps, and then the next, Naruto's amiable chatting floating ahead as she fell behind. Her feet felt leaden, pulling her down to the ground as she still struggled up.

When she finally got there, she lifted her eyes by increments until they fell on Naruto, waiting in the middle of the bridge and looking at her expectantly. Knowing what she would see. Waiting for the thick ropes of Plot winding through and all around him to distort in place, caught in the Device that had been pulled there to wait for him. It was meant to be there, just like she was meant to be there, and when it was finally over, she could maybe leave this stupid goddamn landmark and do something new with her day. Without the Device, without Uchiha-fucking-Itachi lurking around wherever he had settled in nearby, she might be able to take a step forward.

'What's the hold up?' Naruto asked, and there was no distortion at his feet. There was empty, normal air, and no red eyes. Just Naruto, beaming like the sun.

Raiku stared at him for a long, long time, then closed her eyes. Right.

_Something was wrong, and it had to be found._

_Something was wrong, and it had to be fixed._

She nodded, then set her jaw and cracked her knuckles.

At least she could set the goddamn bridge on fire.

**Author's Note:**

> x-posted from ff.net


End file.
